About an hour after his committal, and just previous to the arrival of the vehicle which was to convey him to the county prison, Alfred Bourdon requested an interview with me.  I very reluctantly consented; but steeled as I was against him, I could not avoid feeling dreadfully shocked at the change which so brief an interval had wrought upon him.  It had done the work of years.  Despair—­black, utter despair—­was written in every lineament of his expressive countenance.

“I have requested to see you,” said the unhappy culprit, “rather than Dr. Curteis, because he, I know, is bitterly prejudiced against me.  But you will not refuse, I think, the solemn request of a dying man—­for a dying man I feel myself to be—­however long or short the interval which stands between me and the scaffold.  It is not with a childish hope that any assertion of mine can avail before the tribunal of the law against the evidence adduced this day, that I, with all the solemnity befitting a man whose days are numbered, declare to you that I am wholly innocent of the crime laid to my charge.  I have no such expectation; I seek only that you, in pity of my youth and untimely fate, should convey to her whom I have madly presumed to worship this message:  ’Alfred Bourdon was mad, but not blood-guilty; and of the crime laid to his charge he is innocent as an unborn child.’”

“The pure and holy passion, young man,” said I, somewhat startled by his impressive manner, “however presumptuous, as far as social considerations are concerned, it might be, by which you affect to be inspired, is utterly inconsistent with the cruel, dastardly crime of which such damning evidence has an hour since been given”—­

“Say no more, sir,” interrupted Bourdon, sinking back in his seat, and burying his face in his hands:  “it were a bootless errand; she could not, in the face of that evidence, believe my unsupported assertion!  It were as well perhaps she did not.  And yet, sir, it is hard to be trampled into a felon’s grave, loaded with the maledictions of those whom you would coin your heart to serve and bless!  Ah, sir,” he continued, whilst tears of agony streamed through his firmly-closed fingers, “you cannot conceive the unutterable bitterness of the pang which rends the heart of him who feels that he is not only despised, but loathed, hated, execrated, by her whom his soul idolizes!  Mine was no boyish, transient passion:  it has grown with my growth, and strengthened with my strength.  My life has been but one long dream of her.  All that my soul had drunk in of beauty in the visible earth and heavens—­the light of setting suns—­the radiance of the silver stars—­the breath of summer flowers, together with all which we imagine of celestial purity and grace, seemed to me in her incarnated, concentrated, and combined!  And now lost—­lost—­forever lost!” The violence of his emotions choked his utterance; and deeply and painfully affected, I hastened from his presence.