"Let him die!--let him die!" she exclaimed. "Is not his doom inevitable? You will torture my Eugene by keeping in his life till the law demands its victim, and he may be carried--carried! O God!--to a second death, ten times more cruel than that which he is now suffering." "No rejection of the petition has been intimated," I replied; "and there is hope to the last grain in life's ebbing glass. It is not yet two years since a reprieve came to a prisoner, in this very jail, within three hours of the appointed term of his life. You have spoken from the impulse of an agony which has overcome the truer feelings of a mother and the better dictates of prudence." "Small, small, indeed, is that hope which a mother may not see through the gloom of a despair such as mine," she replied. "But what means that dreadful noise in Eugene's cell?" "Only the efforts of the men to keep him awake," replied I. "My duty requires my efforts in behalf of a fellow-creature to the last moment. Reflect for an instant, and the proper feeling will again vindicate its place in the heart of a parent." "Dreadful alternative!" she replied. "But, sir, hear me. I am his mother, and I tell you, from the divination of a mother's heart, that there will now be no respite. I say it again; it would be a relief to me if I heard, at this moment, that he had escaped by death that tragedy which will now be rendered a thousand times more painful to him and dreadful to me." The father moved his eyes, and fixed them on the face of the mother of his boy, who, in her agony, thus called for his death in a form which bore even a shade of relief from the horror of what awaited the victim. It was, indeed, an extraordinary request; and told, as no words spoken by mortal had ever told, the pregnancy of an anguish that could seek for alleviation (if I may use so inadequate a phrase) from so fearful an alternative. All were, for a time, now silent, and there was no sound to be heard but the deep sobs of the daughter, as she recovered from her swoon; the struggle in the throat of the mother; and the shuffling and tramping in the cell of the prisoner. "There is still hope," I whispered in the ear of the mother. "None--none!" she ejaculated again. "My Eugene! my Eugene!" She reclined back, with her hands over her face, still sobbing out the name of her son. I pointed to the father to assist her, while I should go again to ascertain the state of the son; but he did not seem to understand me--retaining still his rigid position, and looking with the calmness of despair on the scene around him. Her silence continued but a few moments; and when she opened her eyes again, it was to fix them on me. "What are you doing?" she exclaimed again. "What, in the name of heaven, are you doing to my Eugene?--Saving him for second, and still more cruel death. It might have been all over. Let me see him--let me see him!"