136 THE WATCH-TOWER OF KOAT-VEU. 



How mistaken was poor Mary when she deemed her husband's 

 life a scene of continued gaiety, upon which alone she was the only 

 blot. But her midnight chamber might have told her a contrary 

 story. There indeed was the scornful silence broken. There did the 

 half-intoxicated soured sot pour forth the horrid venom of a depraved 

 heart. 



The night always brings reflection. Woe then to the man who 

 has to look upon the past day as a dreary blank in which he has done 

 no good for himself or one human being. Triflingly or mischievously 

 spent; the sum made up of idle visits to grinning children ; time 

 killed here and killed there ; passive, melancholy butchery of 

 little joys that crowd the' precious moments of well-spent hours. 

 Night ! oh night ! how painful are those waking visions, seen through 

 the misty medium of a tipsy brain. Silence around upon the peaceful 

 slumbers of reposing industry ; the feverish mirth subsided behind, 

 and before the prospect of a home in whose silence there is a frown- 

 ing reproach ; in whose one lighted candle there is a melancholy 

 symbol of a wasting spirit. 



The end of this career was such that I could hardly expect to gain 

 credit for the fact, were it not well authenticated, that a man without 

 a stain upon his character, according to the views of the world, a 

 man without one notoriously vicious propensity ,[in a great degree be- 

 loved abroad, in fact, from the mere habit of every-day visits, render- 

 ing his presence so necessary as to be ever welcome, not distressed in 

 his pecuniary affairs, that such a man, almost amiable in the eyes of 

 the world from his agreeability of manners, that such a man should 

 plunge into one wanton, bloody crime, without cause or motive, 

 from the mere excitement of troubled nerves and a brain disordered 

 by self-reproach and dissipation, that such should be the fact ap- 

 pears so astonishing to those who always look fora paramount cause 

 as affecting human actions that it is only upon the solemn as- 

 surance that this is an authentic narrative that I found my expectation 

 for general belief. 



(To be concluded in our next.) 



THE WATCH-TOWER OF KOAT-VEU. 



(Continued from page 73 J 



CHAPTER IV. 



THE duchess of Almeda, a Creole from Havannah, was married 

 while very young to the duke of Almeda. This union was not in 

 accordance with her own wishes, for she felt a growing taste for a 

 religious life ; but, obliged to obey her family, she submitted, and the 

 offices of a sincere piety alone engaged her heart until she canTe to 

 live in France. 



The duke of Almeda was an old man of considerable mental en- 

 dowments, but fascinated, like many of his class, with the sensation 



