were performing.  Did I relish this abuse of personal confidence in myself?  No—­I loathed it, and I grieved for its necessity; but my mother, a phantom not seen with bodily eyes, but ever present to my mind, continually ascended before me; and still I shouted aloud to my astounded victim, ’This comes from the Jewess!  Hound of hounds!  Do you remember the Jewess whom you dishonored, and the oaths which you broke in order that you might dishonor her, and the righteous law which you violated, and the cry of anguish from her son which you scoffed at?’ Who I was, what I avenged, and whom, I made every man aware, and every woman, before I punished them.  The details of the cases I need not repeat.  One or two I was obliged, at the beginning, to commit to my Jews.  The suspicion was thus, from the first, turned aside by the notoriety of my presence elsewhere; but I took care that none suffered who had not either been upon the guilty list of magistrates who condemned the mother, or of those who turned away with mockery from the supplication of the son.

“It pleased God, however, to place a mighty temptation in my path, which might have persuaded me to forego all thoughts of vengeance, to forget my vow, to forget the voices which invoked me from the grave.  This was Margaret Liebenheim.  Ah! how terrific appeared my duty of bloody retribution, after her angel’s face and angel’s voice had calmed me.  With respect to her grandfather, strange it is to mention, that never did my innocent wife appear so lovely as precisely in the relation of granddaughter.  So beautiful was her goodness to the old man, and so divine was the childlike innocence on her part, contrasted with the guilty recollections associated with him—­for he was among the guiltiest toward my mother—­still I delayed his punishment to the last; and, for his child’s sake, I would have pardoned him—­nay, I had resolved to do so, when a fierce Jew, who had a deep malignity toward this man, swore that he would accomplish his vengeance at all events, and perhaps might be obliged to include Margaret in the ruin, unless I adhered to the original scheme.  Then I yielded; for circumstances armed this man with momentary power.  But the night fixed on was one in which I had reason to know that my wife would be absent; for so I had myself arranged with her, and the unhappy counter-arrangement I do not yet understand.  Let me add, that the sole purpose of my clandestine marriage was to sting her grandfather’s mind with the belief that his family had been dishonored, even as he had dishonored mine.  He learned, as I took care that he should, that his granddaughter carried about with her the promises of a mother, and did not know that she had the sanction of a wife.  This discovery made him, in one day, become eager for the marriage he had previously opposed; and this discovery also embittered the misery of his death.  At that moment I attempted to think only of my mother’s