and a convulsed frame! I have described the features of the stranger, when in their calm; but when he raised his head from the table, a change the most singular had taken place. That undying valor, almost stubborn in its expression before, had died away; the beauty of his youth had returned to him, with almost feminine loveliness. Looking up at his friend, he said:
"I can endure it no longer: for years and years, James, I have kept this to myself, but now I must yield. To-day has brought back to me scenes that I have only remembered at midnight in tears. I could not bear to make my sorrows common. I could have borne it to-day, if I had not come here to this house. I bore it when I first met you, my oldest and my dearest friend. I bore it when the world cried murder, and she perished unavenged; when her assassins took possession of their blood-stained gains; when I left the land of my birth, and the home of my youth, and went among strangers to live and toil, toil for my boy, to give him wealth and station such as his sister would have had. I bore it, and took a pride in keeping my sacred agony to myself, when I heard that to appease the famine of some of my shipwrecked sailors, my son was shot. I bore it when I looked again upon the land I had so long left, but never had forgotten; but I could not bear it longer when I saw your wife sitting happily by your side, as my wife used to sit by mine—your daughter smiling, as my poor child used to smile, and your son, just from the college to which mine was going—all there were too much. I have been called an iron man—a man almost dead to human feeling; but you, who have known me, must have known it would come to this at last."
He finished speaking, and after a short interval, we returned to the parlor. The iron armor, once thrown aside, seemed as it never could be resumed, in the presence of his old friend's family. Long-smothered emotions of his heart appeared to well up from him as if his nature had received an invocation. Although that remarkable countenance still wore the traces of long suffering, there beamed over it a pervading recognition of long-sought but just-discovered sympathy. I will not attempt to analyze in the exact crucible of philosophical chemistry the various dispositions that characterized this man.
