"The very words; and were they not enough for proof and belief?"
"Yes, sir; but there are words which have two significations. Ma' is the contraction, as you know, for mamma, but it is pronounced the same as _maw_, which is a word which we use to designate those birds otherwise called gulls. I recollect that while I was unable to bear the sight of the tortured bird, and had turned my head in another direction, my nephew kept looking over the rails, and that, as he saw the struggling creature, he cried out to me the words you misconstrued. And thus the mystery is cleared up."
"Miserable and fatal error," he gasped out, as he staggered back. "And the connection!--the connection! There _was_ retribution in those diamond eyes."
"The bird's eyes that haunt me in my reveries, and enter into the sockets of my dream-beings!"
"No; or the heavens are mad, with their swirling orbs and blazing comets, that rush sighing through space before some terrible power that will give them no respite, except with the condition that when they rest they die."
"Poor youth! so early doomed; I pity you."
"Ay, pity those who have no pity--those are the truly wretched; for pity, in the world's life, is the soul of reason's action. Ah, madam, it is those who have pity who do not need the pity of others, for they are generally free from the faults that produce the unhappiness that needs pity."
"But you have been punished, I admit, in a very strange and mysterious way; for the word used by the boy was the joining link of the two transactions, and you were led to misconstrue it--ay, and to take advantage of your misconstruction to get the better of your friend."
"But I say you have been punished," continued she, consolingly; "and I perceive you are penitent--perhaps justice is satisfied; and when you are liberated, you may be the better for the lesson. I shall now reverse my prayer, and say to one I shall perhaps never see again, May God deal mercifully by you."
And with these words, she retreated. But her prayer was never answered, so far as man can judge of heaven's mysterious ways. The conviction settled down and down into his heart, that that apparently simple affair of killing a bird--which, even with the aggravation of all the cruelty exhibited by the thoughtless, yet certainly pitiless youth, is so apt to be viewed carelessly, or only with an avowal of disapprobation--which, if too much insisted on as an act to be taken up by superior retribution, is more apt still to be laughed at--was the cause of all the ills that had befallen him. The diamond eyes proved to him no fancy. But for all this, we are afforded, by what subsequently occurred, some means of explanation, which will be greedily laid hold of by minute philosophers. Even then it was to have been feared that the seeds of consumption had been deposited in favourable soil. In our difficulties about explanations of mental phenomena, we readily flee to diseases of the body, which, after all, only removes the mystery a step or two back in the dark.