with my imagination in wakeful subjugation to the images of these
eternal Bernards. Bernard still! on the top of the title page was
written "Amelia Bernard." The charm was here too. Which of these fair
creatures on the wall was the proprietor of this brochure? She had read
it surely with care. She must have cherished it, or why identify it as
her own? Perhaps she was a lover of old books; it could not be that she
was a lover of cruel stories. Those eyes were made for throwing forth
the lambent light of affection and love; how unlike to the staring
blood-shot orbs of that Jane Grierson on that terrific woodcut! Yet,
true to the nature of my species, at least my sex, I found in the grim
pamphlet that inexpressible something which recommends coarse recitals
of human depravity even to cultivated minds, and which consists probably
in the conformity between the thing itself and the description of it;
the rugged words, semblances of the rugged implements, and the savage
actions of cruelty, address themselves to the latent barbarism which
lies as the lowest stratum of our many piled nature, and receive the
savage response at the moment we blush for humanity. These dire images
of the murderer's story were stronger than those of the Bernards--even
of those lovely faces on the wall--and as the candle burned down, and
the red wick grew up, I read and read on, how the cruel fiend did
destroy while she fawned upon her victim; how that victim, overcome by
the kindness of her enemy, praised her to her husband, who loved his
wife to distraction; and how she, even in her devoted gratitude,
recommended her murderer as her successor to the bed she lay on, and to
those arms where she so often had enjoyed the pressure of his love. Nor
was the recommendation ineffectual, for the said wicked Jane did become
the wife of her victim's husband. The old horrid savagery of our
criminal literature!--not yet abated--never to be abated--only glossed
with tropes and figures more hideous than the plain narrative of blood.

It was a vain thought that I should read myself asleep among the
terrible images suggested by my brochure. I was even more vigilant than
before. Then, that Francis seemed never at rest; I heard him clambering
up stairs, tramping along passages, shutting doors, speaking to himself,
just as if all the actions of his prior life were being gone over again.
I would have another visit, and another long narrative of some Bernard,
whose picture