a deliberate lie. I expressed in my answer all that an honest man
naturally feels, when he is writing to a friend in distress;
carefully abstaining from any allusion to the memory of his wife,
or to the place which her death had left vacant in his household.
My letter, I am sorry to say, disappointed and offended him. He
wrote to me no more, until years had passed, and time had exerted
its influence in producing a more indulgent frame of mind. These
letters of a later date have been preserved, and will probably be
used, at the right time, for purposes of explanation with which
I may be connected in the future.

. . . . . . .

The correspondent whom I had now lost was succeeded by
a gentleman entirely unknown to me.

Those reasons which induced me to conceal the names of persons,
while I was relating events in the prison, do not apply to
correspondence with a stranger writing from another place. I may,
therefore, mention that Mr. Dunboyne, of Fairmount, on the west
coast of Ireland, was the writer of the letter now addressed to
me. He proved, to my surprise, to be one of the relations whom
the Prisoner under sentence of death had not cared to see, when
I offered her the opportunity of saying farewell. Mr. Dunboyne
was a brother-in-law of the murderess. He had married her sister.

His wife, he informed me, had died in childbirth, leaving him
but one consolation--a boy, who already recalled all that was
brightest and best in his lost mother. The father was naturally
anxious that the son should never become acquainted with