of minstrel life:

A horrible murder had been committed. All engaged in it, including the
victim, were foreigners. There was not a redeeming feature, not even
the rather equivocal one of passion's frenzy, connected with the deed.
It was deliberate, long-concerted, mercenary, atrocious, and bloody.
The murderers--there were two--were shortly afterwards arrested; tried,
convicted, and sentenced to death, with a dispatch and inexorableness
which--probably owing to their friendlessness--was somewhat unusual
under the statutes of this State. The most affecting incident connected
with the condemned--both of them desperate villains--was the parting
scene between the Italian criminal (his comrade was a Spaniard) and his
child. This was a little girl, scarcely ten years of age; I doubt if
she numbered so many. The man was low-browed, narrow-templed, and of a
generally brutal, repulsive aspect. They were about to lead him into
the dungeon of the condemned, the studded door of which would not open
again save to admit his passage to the gallows-tree; and his poor child
was beside him. Hardened, sin-stained as he was, the father was himself
visibly affected; but the tempest of wild, passionate grief that
agitated the little girl, so soon to be left an orphan, was something
remarkable in one of her years.

She was evidently a child of the streets. Her dress was ragged and
foul, and even her face so unclean as to be barely redeemed by the
large, beautiful black eyes which would alone have betrayed the sunny
clime of her origin. While the wretched criminal stood, shame-facedly
and with drooping crest, before her, she fell upon his manacled hands,
kissing them wildly, and betraying in her childish grief all the deep,
sensitive, despairing sorrow of a woman. The villain before her might
have often beaten her, debased her immeasurably, but the mysterious