Guy Rivers: A Tale of GeorgiaSimms, William Gilmore
History
Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia
Simms, William Gilmore
Georgia -- History -- 1775-1865 -- Fiction; Gold mines and mining -- Fiction
together, were conclusive; and, when it was found that not a solitary
witness came forward even to say that the accused was a man of character
and good connections--a circumstance which could not materially affect
the testimony as it stood, but which, wanting, gave it additional
force--the unhappy youth, himself, felt that all was over.
A burning flush, succeeded by a deathlike paleness, came over his face
for a moment--construed by those around into a consciousness of guilt;
for, where the prejudices of men become active, all appearances of
change, which go not to affect the very foundation of the bias, are only
additional proofs of what they have before believed. He rested his head
upon his hands in deep but momentary agony. What were his feelings then?
With warm, pure emotions; with a pride only limited by a true sense of
propriety; with an ambition whose eye was sunward ever; with affections
which rendered life doubly desirable, and which made love a high and
holy aspiration: with these several and predominating feelings
struggling in his soul, to be told of such a doom; to be stricken from
the respect of his fellows; to forfeit life, and love, and reputation;
to undergo the punishment of the malefactor, and to live in memory only
as a felon--ungrateful, foolish, fiendish--a creature of dishonest
passions, and mad and merciless in their exercise!
The tide of thought which bore to his consciousness all these harrowing
convictions, was sudden as the wing of the lightning, and nearly
shattered, in that single instant, the towering manhood whose high
reachings had attracted it. But the pride consequent to his education,
and the society in which he had lived, came to his relief; and, after
the first dreadful agony of soul, he again stood erect, and listened,
seemingly unmoved, to the defences set up by his counsel.
But how idle, even to his mind, desirous as he must have been of every
species of defence, were all the vainglorious mouthings of the
pettifogger! He soon discovered that the ambition of Pippin chiefly
consisted in the utterance of his speech. He saw, too, in a little
while, that the nonsense of the lawyer had not even the solitary
merit--if such it be--of being extemporaneous; and in the slow and
monotonous delivery of a long string of stale truisms, not bearing any
analogy to the case in hand, he perceived the dull elaborations of the
closet.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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