In the midst of the confusion produced in my mind by what I had seen and heard, the glare of a revealed mystery flashed upon me; and I shuddered even to think of what might turn out to be true. Could it it be possible that that wretched man whose bones hung before me--whose sufferings at his trial, in the jail, on the scaffold, were unprecedented, and such as no man ever endured--was innocent of the crime for which he was hanged? Even the suspicion was too painful to me; and I recoiled from the skeleton, as my eye, led by my thoughts, rested on the grim memorial. The agitation into which I was thrown rendered me incapable of thought. "Get him home! get him home!" I cried to my apprentice, and sought, in the retirement of another room, some refuge from these sights, and an opportunity of calmly contemplating all the bearings of this apparently dreadful discovery. My apprentice, with difficulty, got the unhappy man into my coach, and took him home. Next day, I was called, early in the forenoon, by an express from his wife. I found him in bed, in the very room where Mr. T---- was murdered. An attack of his disease was upon him, and his conscience had roused him to a degree bordering on madness. Vain, indeed, would be my effort to describe what I now saw and heard; the powers of the physical and moral demons that externally and internally, at the same moment, wrung his nerves and fired his brain, seemed to vie with each other in the degree of torture to which they were capable of elevating his sufferings. His broken exclamations shewed that he was more and more convinced that the pain he endured was a part of the punishment of the crime that lay on his conscience; and, being only a foretaste of that he was doomed to suffer in another world, his imagination was haunted by the shadows of coming ills, a thousand times more terrible than were those he was struggling with, dreadful as those were. Screams, prayers, and ejaculations, succeeded each other unremittingly. As Despair threw over him her dark mantle, he raised himself in the bed, and, grasping the bedclothes, wrung them between his hands, and twisted them in intricate torsels round his arms, beating his head against the posts, and gnashing his teeth with the fury of a maniac. I waited until the paroxysm should pass over, in order to get from him the dreadful truth. His wife looked on him with eyes where no tear softened the fiery glance of horror and despair, and I conjectured, from her changed appearance, that she had heard some part of his confession. All at once he became calm, and I perceived he fixed his look upon me. I returned steadily his glance. Holding out his arms, he said, with an effort to resist an impulse to fury--