loody mouth, and eyes forced out of their
sockets, buried in the dunghill behind her father's hut--not hanged,
because a surgeon, originally bred a sow-gelder, swore that he believed
the mother had unconsciously destroyed her offspring in the throes of
travail, if indeed it had ever breathed, for the lungs would not swim,
he swore, in a basin of water--so the incestuous murderess was let
loose; her brother got hanged in due time after the mutiny at the
Nore--and her father, the fishmonger--why, he went red raving mad as if
a dog had bitten him--and died, as the same surgeon and sow-gelder
averred, of the hydrophobia, foaming at the mouth, gnashing his teeth,
and some said cursing, but that was a calumny, for something seemed to
be the matter with his tongue, and he could not speak, only
splutter--nobody venturing, except his amiable daughter--and in that
particular act of filial affection she was amiable--to hold in the
article of death the old man's head;--Be it that moping idiot that would
sit, were she suffered, on, on, on--night and day for ever, on the
self-same spot, whatever that spot might be on which she happened to
squat at morning, mound, wall, or stone--motionless, dumb, and, as a
stranger would think, also blind, for the eyelids are still shut--never
opened in sun or storm;--yet that figure--that which is now, and has for
years been, an utter and hopeless idiot, was once a gay, laughing,
dancing, singing girl, whose blue eyes seemed full of light, whether
they looked on earth or heaven, the flowers or the stars--her
sweetheart--a rational young man, it would appear--having leapt out upon
her suddenly, as she was passing through the churchyard at night, from
behind a tombstone, in a sack which she, having little time for
consideration, and being naturally superstitious, supposed to be a
shroud, and the wearer thereof, who was an active stripling of sound
flesh and blood, to be a ghost or skeleton, all one horrid rattle of
bones; so that the trick succeeded far beyond the most sanguine
expectation of the Tailor who played the principal part--and sense,
feeling, memory, imagination, and reason, were all felled by one blow of
fear--as butcher felleth ox--while by one of those mysteries, which
neither we, nor you, nor anybody else, can understand, life remained not
only unimpaired, but even invigorated; and there she sits, like a clock
wound up to go a certain time, the machinery of which being good, has
not been