Ye seem to look on me with asking eyes! Listen! and I will tell a fearful story! Since I remember aught about myself, A strange heart sickness almost like to death, A deep remorse for some unacted crime, For some impossible, nameless wickedness, Was on me--in its prophecy I lived; No wretch dragg'd on to execution E'er felt more horrid pangs than then stirr'd up My spirit with remorseful agony.--JOHN WILSON. Eighteen months had passed since the murder of Oswald Waring, and yet the murderer had not been apprehended. Though, upon the night of that fatal catastrophe, both the regular and volunteer police had turned out in great numbers, and scattered themselves over the neighborhood in pursuit of the criminal; though trained sleuth-hounds had been made to smell his clothing, and had been set upon his scent; though, thus with men and dogs, the authorities had hunted him throughout the State, and had offered the largest rewards for his betrayal or apprehension, this length of time had passed, and he had not been arrested. Mr. Waring having died intestate, his property, according to the laws of that commonwealth, fell to the next of kin. His childless widow inherited none of her late husband's wealth, but returned to New Orleans, and thence retired to the country, to live upon her own reserved patrimony. The plantation fell into other hands, and the planter passed out of memory. Valentine, with his crime and his fate, overlaid by newer excitements, was already sinking into oblivion. He was supposed to have escaped from the State. But there were three faithful friends who knew that, in all this time, the miserable young man had never left the neighborhood, or wandered five miles from the blood-stained floor of his crime. Phædra was set free. The quadroons and mestizzas, with all their fiery vehemence of temperament, have perhaps less of real vital stamina than any other race. They cannot bear up under any great mental or physical pressure. Phædra, by the terrible blow that had fallen upon her, was crushed into premature age and decrepitude. And, as a useless old crone, she was suffered by her new master to retire to a lone cabin in the pine barrens above the cypress swamp, and, without being required to work, was supplied with rations of food and clothing upon an equal footing with the plantation laborers. But this poor Naomi, in her desolation, had also her Ruth. Fannie had almost miraculously recovered from the yellow fever; and, in the mental imbecility that had attended her convalescence, she had been long shielded from the knowledge of the calamity that had fallen upon them all; and at last so gradually did the facts of the catastrophe enter her mind that she could never after say when or how she first learned the sum of her misery; and thus she was spared the sudden shock that must certainly have proved fatal to her.