July noon
Salome Owen was the eldest of five children , who , by the death of both parents , had been thrown penniless upon the world , and found a temporary asylum in the county poor-house . Her mother she remembered merely as a feeble , fractious invalid ; and her father , who had long been employed as superintendent of large mills belonging to Miss Jane Grey , had , after years of reckless intemperance , ended his wretched career in a fit of mania a potu . His death occurred at a season when Miss Grey was confined to her bed by an attack of rheumatism , which rendered her a cripple for the remainder of her days ; but the first hours of her convalescence were spent in devising plans for the education and maintenance of his helpless orphans . In the dusty , cheerless yard of the poor-house she had found the little group huddled under a mulberry tree one hot July noon ; and , sending the two younger children to the orphan asylum in a neighboring town , she had apprenticed one boy to a worthy carpenter , another to an eminent horticulturist in a distant State ; and Salome , the handsomest and brightest of the flock , she carried to her own home as an adopted child . Here , for four years , the girl had lived in peace and luxurious ease , surrounded by all the elegances and refining associations which though not inherent in are at the command of wealth ; and so rapidly and gracefully had she fitted herself into the new social niche , that the dark and stormy morning of her life had become only a dim and hideous recollection , that rarely lifted its hated visage above the smooth and shining surface of the happy present . Fortuitous circumstances constitute the moulds that shape the majority of human lives , and the hasty impress of an accident is too often regarded as the relentless decree of all-ordaining fate ; while to the philosophic anthropologist it might furnish matter for curious speculation whether , if Attila and Alaric had chanced to find themselves the pampered sons of some merchant prince , -- some Rothschild or Peabody of the fifth century , -- their campaigns had not been purely fiscal and bloodless , limited to the leaves of a ledger , while the names of Goth and Hun had never crystallized into synonyms of havoc and ruin ; or had Timour been trained to cabbage-raising and vine-dressing , whether he would not have lived in history as the great horticulturist of Kesth , or the Diocletian of Samarcand , rather than the Tartar tyrant and conqueror of the East ? How many possible Howards have swung at Tyburn ?