“Bartram, I am about to confide to you a chapter from my private history which perhaps might better never be disclosed, and in doing so I am subjecting myself to a painful trial and tearing open a wound not yet healed. And yet I cannot otherwise explain to you the scene which you witnessed a few days since. My story may serve to show you the venom that may exist in a species of human reptile. I need not say that I trust this to you alone. You will understand how great the cause I have for secrecy when you have heard what I am about to relate to you. “Twelve years ago my business often took me up and down the Hudson. Upon one of those trips I met one who seemed to me the perfection of female loveliness. Her deep, dark eyes seemed wells of crystal purity and innocence, and her sweet, fair face haunted my vision for days. “I found myself comparing, mentally, every lovely woman I met with the one face ever before me, and finally began to consider myself a victim to a case of love at first sight. It is needless to say my trips upon the Hudson were frequently repeated after this, and at length fate rewarded me by giving me once more the same lovely fellow-passenger. I managed to find a mutual acquaintance and so followed up my advantage as to become, in a few months, an accepted visitor at her father’s house. She was an only child, the idol of an aged father and mother, who at the end of the following year made me the happiest of men by giving me their daughter’s hand in marriage. “Everything prospered with me. My wife was all that could be desired; three lovely children were born to us; my business ventures were successful, and until five years ago there seemed to be nothing wanting to make the harmony of our united lives complete. “About this time, at the house of a friend, we met a spirit-medium, a Dr. Teasdale. How he ever obtained admittance there I do not know, but there he was, and there we were forced to make his acquaintance. He held a seance, as he called it, and among other things told what my wife had written and sealed in our presence and which never left her hand. I discovered afterwards a bit of impression paper concealed beneath the outer cover of the book he handed her to write upon, which probably aided the spirits in making their revelation. This so interested my wife that she attended a number of seances, and finally invited the Doctor to our house, where he became a frequent visitor. “I never liked the fellow. There was a sort of sneaking hypocrisy about him, it seemed to me, that made me prefer his room to his company. “However, as I seldom interfered with my wife’s actions, I said nothing, thinking she would soon penetrate his shallow mask of deceit and become disgusted with him, as I had.