rse some night would make it a prize,
By a Shocking and Barbarous Murder.

CCCXII.

But spite of hint, and threat, and scoff,
The Leg kept its situation:
For legs are not to be taken off
By a verbal amputation.
And mortals when they take a whim,
The greater the folly the stiffer the limb
That stand upon it or by it--
So the Countess, then Miss Kilmansegg,
At her marriage refused to stir a peg,
Till the Lawyers had fasten'd on her Leg
As fast as the Law could tie it.

CCCXIII.

Firmly then--and more firmly yet--
With scorn for scorn, and with threat for threat,
The Proud One confronted the Cruel:
And loud and bitter the quarrel arose,
Fierce and merciless--one of those,
With spoken daggers, and looks like blows,
In all but the bloodshed a duel!

CCCXIV.

Rash, and wild, and wretched, and wrong,
Were the words that came from Weak and Strong,
Till madden'd for desperate matters,
Fierce as tigress escaped from her den,
She flew to her desk--'twas open'd--and then,
In the time it takes to try a pen,
Or the clerk to utter his slow Amen,
Her Will was in fifty tatters!

CCCXV.

But the Count, instead of curses wild,
Only nodded his head and smiled,
As if at the spleen of an angry child;
But the calm was deceitful and sinister!
A lull like the lull of the treacherous sea--
For Hate in that moment had sworn to be
The Golden Leg's sole Legatee,
And that very night to administer!

HER DEATH.

CCCXVI.

'Tis a stern and startling thing to think
How often mortality stands on the brink
Of its grave without any misgiving:
And yet in this slippery world of strife,
In the stir of human bustle so rife,
There are daily sounds to tell us that Life
Is dying, and Death is living!

CCCXVII.

Ay, Beauty the Girl, and Love the Boy,
Bright as they are with hope and joy,
How their souls would sadden instanter,
To remember that one of those wedding bells,
Which ring so merrily through the dells,
Is the same that knells
Our last farewells,
Only broken into a canter!

CCCXVIII.

But breath and blood set doom at nought--
How little the wretched Countess thought,
When at night she unloosed her sandal,
That the Fates had woven her burial-cloth,
And that Death, in the shape of a Death's Head Moth,
Was fluttering round her candle!

CCCXIX.

As she look'd at her clock of or-molu,
For the hours she had gone so wearily through
At the end of a day of