reverses; and the worried look and wakeful nights of the husband told how heavy were the blows that had fallen upon this hard and willing worker.  The course of ruin in California was fearfully rapid in those days.  When a man’s financial supports began to give way, they went with a crash.  The movement downward was with a rush that gave no time for putting on the brakes.  You were at the bottom, a wreck, almost before you knew it.  So it was in this case.  Every thing was swept away, a mountain of unpaid debts was piled up, credit was gone, clamor of creditors deafened him, and the gaunt wolf of actual want looked in through the door of the cottage upon the dear wife and little ones.  Another shadow, and a yet darker one, settled upon them.  The unhappy man had been tampering with the delusion of spiritualism, and his wife had been drawn with him into a partial belief in its vagaries.  In their troubles they sought the aid of the “familiar spirits” that peeped and muttered through speaking, writing, and rapping mediums.  This kept them in a state of morbid excitement that increased from day to day until they were wrought up to a tension that verged on insanity.  The lying spirits; or the frenzy of his own heated brain, turned his thought to death as the only escape from want.

“I see our way out of these troubles, wife,” he said one night, as they sat hand in hand in the bedchamber, where the children were lying asleep.  “We will all die together!  This has been revealed to me as the solution of all our difficulties.  Yes, we will enter the beautiful spirit-world together!  This is freedom!  It is only getting out of prison.  Bright spirits beckon and call us.  I am ready.”

There was a gleam of madness in his eyes, and, as he took a pistol from a bureau-drawer, an answering gleam flashed forth from the eyes of the wife, as she said: 

“Yes, love, we will all go together.  I too am ready.”

The sleeping children were breathing sweetly, unmindful of the horror that the devil was hatching.

“The children first, then you, and then me,” he said, his eye kindling with increasing excitement.

He penciled a short note addressed to one of his old friends, asking him to attend to the burial of the bodies, then they kissed each of the sleeping children, and then—­but let the curtain fall on the scene that followed.  The seven were found next day lying dead, a bullet through the brain of each, the murderer, by the side of the wife, still holding the weapon of death in his hand, its muzzle against his right temple.

Other pictures of real life and death crowd upon, my mind, among them noble forms and faces that were near and dear to me; but again I hear the appealing voices.  The page before me is wet with tears—­I cannot see to write.

Father Fisher.