stricken survivors in the midst of a scene of horror enough to turn the

steadiest brain. Her parents have disappeared. Search even for their

bodies is in vain. The bewildered, stricken child--who can say what

changes the fearful event wrought in her tender brain--clings to the

first person who shows her sympathy. It is Mrs. Hawkins, this good lady

who is still her loving friend. Laura is adopted into the Hawkins

family. Perhaps she forgets in time that she is not their child. She is

an orphan. No, gentlemen, I will not deceive you, she is not an orphan.

Worse than that. There comes another day of agony. She knows that her

father lives. Who is he, where is he? Alas, I cannot tell you. Through

the scenes of this painful history he flits here and there a lunatic!

If he, seeks his daughter, it is the purposeless search of a lunatic, as

one who wanders bereft of reason, crying where is my child? Laura seeks

her father. In vain just as she is about to find him, again and again-he

disappears, he is gone, he vanishes.

"But this is only the prologue to the tragedy. Bear with me while I

relate it. (Mr. Braham takes out a handkerchief, unfolds it slowly;

crashes it in his nervous hand, and throws it on the table). Laura grew

up in her humble southern home, a beautiful creature, the joy, of the

house, the pride of the neighborhood, the loveliest flower in all the

sunny south. She might yet have been happy; she was happy. But the

destroyer came into this paradise. He plucked the sweetest bud that grew

there, and having enjoyed its odor, trampled it in the mire beneath his

feet. George Selby, the deceased, a handsome, accomplished Confederate

Colonel, was this human fiend. He deceived her with a mock marriage;

590

The Gilded Age