essed by Woodward, for
whom she acted as agent in the business, that poor girl would not have
felt anything like what this diabolical piece of information occasioned
her to experience. From the moment she heard it her active imagination
took the alarm. An unaccountable terror seized upon her; she felt as if
some dark doom was impending over her. It was in a peculiar degree the
age of superstition; and the terrible influence of the Evil Eye was
one not only of the commonest, but the most formidable of them all. The
dark, significant, but sinister gaze of Harry Woodward was, she thought,
forever upon her. She could not withdraw her imagination from it. It
haunted her; it was fixed upon her, accompanied by a dreadful smile of
apparent courtesy, but of a malignity which she felt as if it penetrated
her whole being, both corporeal and mental. She hurried to bed at night
with a hope that sleep might exclude the frightful vision which followed
her; but, alas! even sleep was no security to her against its terrors.
It was now that in her distempered dreams imagination ran riot. She fled
from him, or attempted to fly, but feared that she had not strength for
the effort; he followed her, she thought, and when she covered her face
with her hands in order to avoid the sight of him, she felt him seizing
her by the wrists, and removing her arms in order that he might pour the
malignant influence of that terrible eye into her very heart. From these
scenes she generally awoke with a shriek, when her maid, Sarah Sullivan,
who of late slept in the same room with her, was obliged to come to her
assistance, and soothe and sustain her as well as she could. She then
lay for hours in such a state of terror and agitation as cannot be
described, until near morning, WHen she generally fell into something
like sound sleep. In fact, her waking moments were easy when compared
with the persecution which the spirit of that man inflicted on her
during her broken and restless slumbers. The dreadful eye, as it rested
upon her, seemed as if its powerful but killing expression proceeded
from the heart and spirit of some demon who sought to wither her by
slow degrees out of life; and she felt that he was succeeding in his
murderous and merciless object. It is not to be wondered at, then,
that she dreaded the state of sleep more than any other condition of
existence in which she could find herself. As night, and the hour of
retiring to what ought to have been