XV.THE CHILDREN.
In a court of justice, if I was put upon my oath, I could not swear that it was a ghost that I saw when I stood at the end of the garden on that luminous night; nor would I swear that it was a man with his vitality in force; but I would swear that I saw something that looked like a man, but might have been a ghost. It acted as if it might have been either,—but if a man, like a crazy one, and who had a charm to subdue, upon the instant and without effort, the temper of two severe watch-dogs, one a mastiff, the other a bull, and also to suspend for more than a second my power of vision.
After I had finished writing my narrative, and thought that I had nothing further to do in this business besides giving my manuscript into the hands of the printer, I became possessed of two photographs kindly lent to my curiosity by the chief of police. They are the portraits of Isabella and John Joyce. My first idea was to have them multiplied and affixed somewhere in my pages, but then I thought of the illustrated papers with their abominable attempts to illustrate by the pencil everyspasm to which human nature is incident, and was stopped at once from that design.
The face of the girl is bright, expressive, and, in a degree, pretty. Had she lived to womanhood she might have grown into what is called afinewoman. The features are large and regular, the eyes full of vivacity and good temper, the nose prominent and well shaped, the mouth pleasant, and indicative of resolution. Altogether the girl had a generous and loving kind of lookout, and not rare in the species at her budding and buoyant age. She looks like a child beginning to see the vague outline of the sea on which she must voyage with the rest, and not at all having such quick destruction in her thoughts, as came to her ere she heard the breakers of human experience sobbing on the shore. She was not too young to die, but too young to be slaughtered. The boy’s face is that of a child; but a bright and reflective little fellow, with a large development of brain, and, by the extreme innocence of his expression, casting a deeper shadow of crime upon the wretch who took away his life. Taking the photograph as a test, he seems to be about eight years old and no more, and with such a face that it must have been a sad thing for those who found him, to look upon with the mask of murder stamped upon it.
I have also seen a bundle of papers, written over in large, straggling chirography, and said to be communicationsof spirits, through mediums, upon the topic of the murders. There is one-half page written, so those say,—his wife, for instance,—who knew his “hand of write,” by the dead father of the children. Their testimony, whatever it may be, has as yet been of no special advantage in directing investigation, at least as far as I know; probably on the theory that if the souls of the departed undertook to interfere in the proceedings of our courts, they might produce embarrassing predicaments, being so far as we are instructed in such matters incapable of appearing bodily on the witness-stand to testify to facts within their knowledge; and, besides, it would be exceedingly inconvenient for our judicial officials to serve a summons upon them, as their places of special abode cannot, at present, be determined upon with any exactness outside of a graveyard directory. Cases are, however, upon the record wherein ghosts have pointed out such lines of proceedings as finally led to the proper adjustment of contested property and estates. Perhaps the day may reach us when not only the spirit of the law, and the spirit of the past, but the spirits of the dead, will have large control over the vexed condition of our temporary existence here.