"There's many a one who oft has heard The name of Robert Kyd, Who cannot tell, perhaps, a word Of him, or what he did. "So, though I never saw the man, And lived not in his day, I'll tell you how his guilt began -- To what it led the way." -- H.F. Gould It is its nature to obliterate all dark spots that wrong may have cast upon the heart; to palliate offenses, and to forgive even where forgiveness is a weakness: it makes itself half sharer of the fault; is ever ready to bear the whole weight of the blame, and with open arms to receive back again, without either atonement or acknowledgment, the guilty but still loved offender.

Author Biography

Joseph Holt Ingraham (1809 - 1860) was an American author. He was born in Portland, Maine and spent several years at sea, then worked as a teacher of languages in Mississippi. In the 1840s he published work in Arthur's Magazine. He became an Episcopal clergyman on March 7, 1852. In Natchez, Ingraham married Mary Brooks, a cousin of Phillips Brooks. Under the pen-name F. Clinton Barrington he wrote stories for popular publications like Gleason's Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion. He met Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1846 and told him that he "has written eighty novels and of these twenty during the last year." Ingraham wrote a series of three epistolary novels on biblical themes; The Pillar of Fire, The Throne of David and The Prince of the House of David. The first of these was supposed to illustrate the beginning of Hebraic power, the second its culmination and the last its decadence. Ingraham died at the age of 51, in Holly Springs, Mississippi from an accidental, self-inflicted gunshot wound in the vestibule of his church.