The Ghost of the Cock Lane Ghost

by Henry Morley (uncredited).

Originally published in Household Words (Bradbury & Evans) vol.6 #139 (20 Nov 1852).

        We were recently invited into the company of the Ghost of the Cock Lane Ghost, by an advertisement in the Times Newspaper, in which a demonstrator or showman, Mr. Stone, begged "leave to inform the nobility and gentry that he has just returned from the United States, accompanied by Mrs. M.B. Hayden for the purpose of Demonstrating the wonderful Phenomena known in that country as Spiritual Manifestations, and which have created the most intense excitement in all classes of society—Residence, Twenty-six, Upper Seymour Street, Portman Square. Hours at home, from Eleven to Two and from Four to Six." So the announcement ran. We had read something of the Rochester Rappers and of the mystery, if it be a mystery, called "spirit knocking" in the sentimental language of America. We resolved to visit Mrs. Hayden, and knock up an acquaintance with the ghosts who meet in her apartments, No. Twenty-six, Upper Seymour Streeet, Portman Square. We ourselves happened to be out of spirits, therefore perhaps we made a wise resolve.
        Yet had we gone for mirth into such company, we should have fared as ill as he who for a midnight jest entered his father's sepulchre to sup alone among the dead. If it be true, as the believers in the "spirit knockings" tell us, that the spirits of beloved friends whom we have lost speak to us by a noise of rapping, then our most solemn feelings and our tenderest emotions are awakened by the act of positive communion with the dead.
        If it be otherwise—if that which is the holiest ground within the human heart be through such exhibitions dug into for gold by coarse impostors—if the simple questioner who with trembling nerves believes that she is brought into the presence of an angel mother with whom it is a foretaste of Heaven to converse—if she be played upon by cheats who laugh under their sleeves at her credulity and turn her money in their pockets,—then such cheating is no matter for amusement. That is an impiety and wickedness far exceeding the measure of an ordinary fraud, which trades upon our solemn love towards the dead—

                "In slight of that forbearance and reserve
                Which common human-heartedness inspires,
                And mortal ignorance and frailty claim,
                Upon this sacred ground, if nowhere else."

        There have often been people impelled, out of the ignorance and coarseness of their natures, to the forging of clumsy tales, in which they themselves, together with the Supreme Being, are the chief actors. Not many weeks ago two cowherd's children in France—in consequence of information received direct from the Virgin Mary—became accredited by Infallibility itself as new apostles. Not many months ago a girl in Suffolk dealt divine information through the neighbourhood, attesting her inspiration by total abstinence from food. We may read in pamphlets printed centuries ago, how in some parts of Switzerland and France a divine epidemic seized upon the children, how they preached powerfully in their sleep, and were attended at their bedsides by large congregations; or we may read of "the German Lazarus" who delivered a long list of messages from Heaven, and attested his mission by professing that he never slept. This Lazarus was constantly caught napping; but he explained the fact to his own honour, by stating that his parents were so much distressed by his incessant wakefulness, that he found it necessary to feign sleep occasionally, for the comfort of their minds.
        Knocking or Rapping ghosts are no new imposition. In a relation of facts concerning "spirit-knockings" written in an American pamphlet that is now before us, "by J. Robinson," we are told much, not only of the knockings of the unseen beings, but also of the imitations of evil spirits, which, "resembled scratching produced with the finger nails." Now, will any keeper of a knocking ghost, or any lady or gentleman who has taken up the trade of communicating between knocking spirits and the gullible portion of the public (which lady or gentleman is called in the trade a Medium), turn to the Annual Register for the year 1762, and read what is there entitled "A summary account of the proceedings in regard to some strange noises heard the beginning of the year at a house in Cock Lane, West Smithfield." Having read the said account, let the said ghost-keeper or Medium answer to our catechism on the History of Knockers in a simple way. Q. Who was the first Medium? A. Little Miss Parsons. Q. Who was she? A. The daughter of the clerk of St. Sepulchre's. Q. How did the spirit-knocking in her case begin? A. Her father, the clerk, had taken as lodgers a gentleman and lady, and in the absence of the gentleman, little Miss Parsons slept with the lady, who was called Miss Fanny. Miss Fanny complained one morning that she and her bedfellow had been disturbed all night by noises. The noises continued, and at length excited much attention, but the lady and gentleman removed into the neighbourhood of Clerkenwell (where Miss Fanny presently died), and then the noise in Parsons' house was discontinued. Q. You have said that the first Medium was little Miss Parsons; in what way do you connect the story of the Cock Lane Ghost with her, and discover the resemblance that exists between that child and yourself? A. Eighteen months after Miss Fanny left the Parsonses, and in the beginning of the year 1762, the noises recommenced, and it is recorded of little Miss Parsons, that the child, upon certain knockings and scratchings, which seemed to proceed from beneath her bedstead, was sometimes thrown into violent fits and agitations; and a woman attendant, or the father, Mr. Parsons, put questions to the spirit or ghost, as it was supposed by the credulous to be, and they had also dictated how many knocks should serve for an answer, either in the affirmative or negative. Now this plan, invented by little Miss Parsons, differs in no material respect from my own. Q. What was the object of Miss Parsons and her friends? A. The ghost declared itself to be the ghost of the deceased Miss Fanny, and its business was to accuse the gentleman of having poisoned her by giving to her arsenic in a glass of purl when she was ill of small-pox. Q. Was not that very wicked? A. It was very capitally done. Little Miss Parsons was removed from house to house, but the noises followed her, the ghost protesting that she would follow her wherever she went, and the exhibition was exceedingly attractive; for, as it is said in the Annual Register, "numbers of persons of fortune and character, and several clergymen, assisted at the vagaries of the invisible knocker and scratcher." Q. Were the pretensions of this girl seriously tested? A. Yes, they were, she was tied up in a hammock with her feet and hands bound apart from one another, but the ghost refused then to make its knockings audible. The spirit had also promised by an affirmative knock, that it would attend three gentlemen into the vault under St. John's church, and knock in their presence upon the coffin (Miss Fanny's) wherein lay her body. Q. I think I remember some lines by Churchill on the subject of this expedition to the vault. Can you repeat some of them? A. I can, for I have found them in the Register. They begin "Dark was the night," and after exactly a hundred lines of exordium by which the expectation of the reader is prepared, they proceed in ten lines more to disclaim all straining after false effect, and then relate in a single couplet the adventure of the descent to the vault:

                "Silent all three went in; about
                All three turn'd silent, and came out."

        Q. What was the end of the story of the Cock Lane Ghost? A. The condemnation of poor Mr. Parsons to the pillory. Q. May you not conclude from this, that spirit-knocking is unsuited to the genius of this country? A. I do not know. The people pitied Mr. Parsons, and no egg was lifted up against him.
        The Fox family, by whom this ghostly rapping was revived in America not many years ago, were so successful in their venture—retiring very soon upon a little independence—that the spirit trade, as carried on by them, became at once an established business. A ghost in Rhode Island, improving upon the practice of his ancestor in Cock Lane, induced a young woman to give a dose of arsenic to her stepbrother. In Oneida County there sprang up an association of persons who had become, as they said, impressed by the intimacy which was springing up between the world of flesh and the world of spirits. These people, taking the coarse view of things that superstition favours, believed that we were on the point of realising that state of affairs of which we read in Moore's Loves of the Angels, or in Byron's Heaven and Earth. "Spirits," they said, "are beginning to have power to form friendships and connexions with mortals," and since, as they declared, it would be wicked to form contracts that might interfere with the rights, and defeat the unknown possible desires, of spirits, two hundred men and sixty women—having a few mediums, no doubt, among their number—abolished marriages. Emboldened by the credulity of thousands who believed in the establishment of a direct communication with the spirit world, some blasphemous persons at Auburn, in the State of New York—determined that no dark recess of profanity, out of which gold could be taken, should be left unvisited—published a newspaper, conducted by the Apostles and the Prophets, under the direction of the Lord Supreme! We quote from the prospectus, simply stating that the publication of the newspaper therein announced did really take place, and was, in fact, a very dreary sample of the lucubrations of the Rappers. "This publication," the prospectus said, "is dictated by spirits out of the flesh, and by them edited, superintended, and controlled. Its object is, the disclosure of truth from Heaven, guiding mankind into open visions of Paradise; open communication with spirits redeemed; and proper and progressive understanding of the Holy Scriptures, and of the merits of Jesus Christ, from whom they originated in inspiration absolute, and of whom they teach, as the only Saviour of a dissevered and bewildered race. The circle of Apostles and Prophets are its conductors from the interior; holding control over its columns, and permitting no article to find place therein unless originated, dictated, or admitted by them; they acting under the direction of the Lord Supreme. James Congdon, Charles Coventry, Andrew L. Wilson, and Lonson Bush are its publishers and proprietor; they having become, in full confidence of mind, disciples of the Lord, and being present external agents of the circle apostolic and prophetic; acting under the direction, while faithful, as instruments for the distribution of truth."
        The Fox family, of Rochester, U.S., as we have already said, first revived in America the modern variations on the story of the Cock Lane Ghost. When tested fairly by a perfect stranger, their ghosts rapped out nothing but blunders: however, we are not left even to infer the dishonesty of their pretensions; we have clearer evidence, not only of their fraud, but of the way in which they practised it. Mrs. Norman Culver, a relation of these Foxes, assisted in the depredations upon geese, and shared their secret; but was not so much a wonder of a woman as to keep it. She therefore made a formal deposition, certified by two respectable witnesses, at the town of Arcadia, in the province of New York, in which, among other things she said, "I am, by marriage, a relation of the Fox girls; their brother married my husband's sister. The girls have been a great deal at my house, and for about two years I was a very sincere believer in the rappings; but some things which I saw when I was visiting the girls at Rochester made me suspect that they were deceiving. I resolved to satisfy myself in some way; and some time afterwards I made a proposition to Catherine to assist her in producing the manifestations. I had a cousin visiting me from Michigan, who was going to consult the spirits, and I told Catherine that if he intended to go to Detroit, it would be a great thing for them to convince him. I also told her that if I could do anything to help her, I would do it cheerfully; that I should probably be able to answer all the questions he would ask, and I would do it if she would show me how to make the raps. She said that as Margaretta was absent, she wanted somebody to help her, and that if I would become a Medium, she would explain it all to me." Mrs. Culver thus became an accomplice, and after she had assisted a few times in conveying hints that would suffice for the conquest of her sceptical cousin from Detroit, after a brief probation, she was admitted to a full participation in the mysteries.
        We call particular attention to her story. "The raps," deposed Mrs. Culver, "are produced with the toes. All the toes are used. After nearly a week's practice, with Catherine showing me how, I could produce them perfectly myself. At first it was very hard work to do it. Catherine told me to warm my feet, or put them in warm water, and it would then be easier work to rap; she said that she had sometimes to warm her feet three or four times in the course of an evening. I found that heating my feet did enable me to rap a great deal easier. I have sometimes produced a hundred and fifty raps in succession. I can rap with all the toes on both feet; it is most difficult to rap with the great toe. Catherine told me how to manage to answer the questions. She said it was generally easy enough to answer right, if the one who asked the questions called the alphabet." And so forth, the rest of the details of trickery being all clumsy and common-place enough.
        This being the substance of our readings in the matter of knocking and rapping spirits, we paid our visit to the London ghosts established in genteel apartments in Upper Seymour Street, Portman Square, very soon after we accidentally saw the advertisement we have set forth.
        We were two—Brown and Thompson. We rapped at the door of the house in which the knocker lived, on a cloudy and warm evening in the beginning of this present November, which month began, as all the country knows, with days unusually dull and close. We do not idly talk about the weather, for it has a definite connection with our story. Having inquired whether Mr. Stone was at home, well knowing that he was—for he had advertised himself to be at home at that hour in the evening to all parties who dsired an introduction to the world of spirits—and having replied to the question about our names by stating that our calling was "in consequence of an advertisement," we were conducted to a drawing-room, in which we found that the maid who preceded us had just lighted the fire. Mr. Stone presently appearing, solemn as became a man who knew his lodgings to be haunted, pointed courteously to the sticks that had begun to crackle in the grate over the lighted paper, and murmured "We have had no fire here; we did not like to light it, for it is so very warm." Truly no fire was needed, and we have a reason of our own for citing Mr. Stone's corroboration of the fact.
        To Mr. Stone, who "had just returned from the United States" with Mrs. Hayden, for the purpose of demonstrating those wonderful phenomena, which "have created the most intense excitement in all classes or society," we introduced ourselves by saying that we had called in consequence of an advertisement; and we sat down before the man who was to bring us to the world of ghosts.
        "You are aware," he said, "that I have given a good deal of my attention to electro-biology?" We were aware. "I have recently visited America, where great sensation has been made by manifestations from the world of spirits, made by means of a noise, like rapping. You have perhaps heard of the Rappers?" Something; we came there to be informed. "It is very curious," said Mr. Stone. "I have examined these manifestations with great industry, and I have arrived at the conviction that they are true, that they cannot be explained by human minds, that they really do emanate from the spirit world. The lady whom I have brought with me is decidedly the best Medium I met with, and I, therefore, thought it well that the phenomena should be investigated in this country." Mr. Stone here pausing and looking into the fire, we inquired what might be the theory of Mediums? "It is very singular," said Mr. Stone. "There are some persons in whose sphere the spirits have more power. The grossness of matter commonly repels them, but there are some people whose nervous systems appear to act—you know how delicate the nervous system is—whose nervous systems appear to act as—we can only suppose, of course, we do not profess to account for these things—as conductors, as magnets, so to speak, whose bodies are surrounded by an atmosphere in which the spirits freely move. In the neighbourhood of such a person, spirits manifest themselves. Such a person is a Medium." "Your Medium sits at the table, and the ghosts rap on it?" we asked. "She must sit near the table," answered Mr. Stone, "because—we cannot control or account for it—the spirits will not knock beyond her influence. That is the nature and the necessity of the Medium, but sometimes the spirits will perform their promise to follow some person to a distant place and knock." (The Ghost of Cock Lane, and the descent into the vault, to witness!) "We were demonstrating the other evening at the house of a distinguished gentleman in the country, when a spirit promised to be present to him in his library at a fixed hour. The gentleman listened, and, being very deaf, heard nothing; but, on holding his ear more attentively, he said that he distinctly thought he caught a rapping. It is very curious that the spirits accommodate themselves to deaf people. During the whole of the evening at this gentleman's, the spirits knocked more loudly than usual."
        When Mr. Stone had further talked about distinguished patronage, and about the wonders that had been performed, one of us suggested to him, delicately, as unwilling to hurt his feelings by implying too roughly that a man who trembled on the confines of the other world could think of money, that "Of course we knew that his time was not wholly given to the public—that there was some honorarium," the reply was prompt. "One guinea each person, or five guineas for a party of ten." This being understood, we felt our way to the inquiry, which we shaped as well as we could, "When will the performance begin?" The reply being in effect "We take in each party separately," we signified our desire to be taken in as soon as possible.
        The door into the back drawing-room being then opened, we were introduced to Mr. and Mrs. Hayden, the Medium's husband, and the Medium. Introduction having been promptly made, we were left—we, Messrs. Brown and Thompson—in the lady's hands. She sat opposite to us on one side of the round table, firm as a rock.
        The Medium sat not only opposite to us, but opposite to the fire. It had first occurred to us when we went into that back drawing-room, that the kitchen had come upstairs; there was such an enormous fire in the grate. Though it was so warm out of doors that, as Mr. Stone remarked, "We did not like to light the fire" in the front drawing-room; in the back room the glowing coals were heaped into a red-hot mountain; and the whole atmosphere was feverish. What did Catherine Fox tell Mrs. Culver? "Catherine told me to warm my feet, or put them in warm water, and it would then be easier work to rap: she said that she had sometimes to warm her feet three or four times in the course of an evening."
        As we sat in the hot room, with the table between us, opposite to the Medium who sat opposite to the fire, we had begun to ponder upon by-gone people, and to think how we could seize "the vapoury phantoms of futurity" by questioning the ghosts. "Can we call any spirit?" "You can speak only with spirits in the room; the room is full of spirits, and some one spirit that is present will often go out, if you wish it, to fetch you another with whom you desire to communicate. If you question one who is here, he will knock, or if you wait, some spirit that desires to communicate with one of us will knock, and call attention to itself."—"How did you become a Medium?" "I did not know what it meant when I used to hear the spirits rapping about me in my bedroom, and following me wherever I went. They knocked so distinctly that my husband—who heard them also, when I was present—once got up and opened the parlour door, thinking that there was somebody who wanted to come in. Then I found out that they were spirits who desired to speak, and had no other way at present of communicating with us. If you ask them any question, and they answer yes, they rap; and if they answer no, they are silent. If we use letters of the alphabet, and point to them in succession, they will spell out sentences, and in that way tell what they wish." This was the substance of the account given by the Medium, who added some examples of the care taken of herself by the spirits, and of a communication of importance made to her that morning by a deceased child; a story told to us already in the next room by Mr. Stone, whose version had, however, in one point, differed materially from the Medium's.
        A large card lay before us on the table, upon which were printed in capitals, row after row, the letters of the alphabet, and in a last row the numerals 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0. There were also pencils with which we might point, and there was paper upon which we might write down the letters as the spirits indicated them, and spell out the messages delivered from the other world.
        We were quite still. Brown was solemn; Thompson looked into vacancy; the Medium looked down into the table: we were waiting for a communication from any kind ghost who would

                "Be as a presence or a motion—one
                Among the many there."—(Rap-tap.)

        "There is a rapping!" said Mrs. Hayden with an indistinct certainty about the expression of her voice, as though she really fancied that she heard a rapping, but might be in error. "Who knocks ?" we desired to know. "The spirit" said Mrs. Hayden, "desires to communicate with one of us." Then, talking with her mouth near to the table, as though she were about to sip knowledge from spirits in the wood, she asked "Who do you speak to? Is it to me?" (No rapping.) "Is it to this gentleman?" (No rapping.) "Is it to that gentleman." (Rap-tap.) That gentleman was Mr. Thompson, who was requested to converse with the spirit: it was probably that of a near relative.
        Says Thompson, "Are you related to me?"
        Rap-tap.
        "What is the relationship between us?"
        Thompson is directed to take up the alphabet, begin at A, and point to all the letters in succession. When Thompson points at M there is a rap-tap. M is put down by his friend Brown upon a piece of paper as the first letter of the word, and Thompson travels through the alphabet again till he is stopped at O, which Brown puts down, while Thompson begins again and gets to T, where, being stopped, to save trouble, he says, "Is it Mother ?" Rap-tap. Mother; very good.
        But Thompson does not laugh, for very dear to his heart is the thought of a mother who has been known to him from early childhood only as an angel. Surely she would speak to her son, if she had power, though she has been parted from him for so many years. What starlight musings of the boy who thought that guardian angels lived in stars, and looked up at the sky for hours, to dream which was the bright particular star in which his angel dwelt; what yearnings of the youth for a mother's sympathy and guidance when all passions and affections were astir; what sacred mysteries belonging to the inmost thoughts of a whole life, so far as it has gone, were touched by the assertions that the spirit of the lost mother was first to speak. Truly then, if there were truth in Rapping, and if that spirit had addressed her son, she would have spoken not in vain.
        "Have you anything to say to me?" asked Thompson. Rap-tap. "Will you say it?" Then, by the most tedious process of getting each letter in succession knocked out of the card, and with a few mistakes in spelling, which were corrected as they were made, but which consumed time, the spirit rapped out this sentence: "Dear son, I am well pleased to see you. I watch over you and God blesses you." Satisfactory, no doubt. A kind of sentence that might be regarded by any reasonable person as a sure proof of the ghost's authenticity. But would she in the next place authenticate her claim to be the mother of Thompson? Would she convince her son by telling him her Christian name? Thompson began the alphabet with an inscrutable face: but the light from the fire and window, although good enough for a ghost, or for a common purpose, was not good for a Medium. The spirit rapped at T (wrong), at I (wrong), at M (wrong); finally made out Timok—truly an odd Christian name for an English lady; and having, in this instance, the curious peculiarity that it did not contain a single letter of the name that should have been communicated. But Timok might be something mystic. The Medium said it was not mystic but mistake, and complained of the bad light. Spirits, perhaps, are forbidden spectacles. No more must be done until a lamp was lighted.
        Then it was again distinctly intimated to the professed spirit of Thompson's mother, who had sought this conversation, that nothing mystical was wanted, only the Christian name she had before she died—"Went into the spirit world," said the Medium, "the spirits never talk of death."—"Before you went into the spirit world. Do you remember what that name was?" Rap-tap. "Will you tell it me?" Rap-tap. "Do so then, now, if you please." So again came the answer knocked up from the alphabet, this time, E-U-N-I-C-E—of course, ridiculously wrong—but, as Eunice means "a happy victory," and it might be again said that the spirit was mystical, Thompson said, "We will presume that there may be some hidden meaning." "Hidden meaning, you think?" said Mrs. Hayden, listlessly, as though the spirits and their sayings were rather affairs of ours than of hers. "Shall we try again for the real name?" "No," said Thompson, "it is not worth while; I will be satisfied with the first letter of it." It was then most elaborately defined to the ghost, with almost legal periphrasis, what was required, and the ghost by rap-taps declared itself perfectly clear in its mind, and ready to oblige. "So now for the initial of your Christian name in this world?"—T. "Is that right?" asked the Medium. Thompson said no. "Then we had better try again, there may be some mistake." The Medium explained the matter in her own way to the table, and trying again, speculated again unluckily upon M. That was again quite wrong, and the Medium proposed to try again. Thompson had no doubt, that in not more than twenty-six trials, and, perhaps, in one or two less, the right letter could be hit upon: so declared himself content. He would now be glad if the supposed ghost of his mother would condescend to name the year in which she passed into the spirit world. Did she remember it? Rap-tap. Would she tell it? Rap-tap. And what year was it? Figures being now touched on the card instead of letters, there was a tap at one, a tap at eight, a tap at four (wrong, it should have been at two), and a last tap at nine, which the spirit recanted by refusing to ratify the whole number when asked at the end whether it was what she meant. The Medium probably caught a smile on Thompson's face, and reserved to herself the advantage of another guess; she then settled upon the year 1846, which was by more than twenty years a blunder. Thompson then ceased from his inquiries, and we all proposed to wait and try the powers of another spirit.
        After the usual solemnities, there was a rapid rat-tat-tat-tat. "What does that mean?" asked Brown. The Medium explained that no two spirits have the same rap, and that by familiarity you know the rap of any spirit as distinctly as you know a voice. That spirits rapped according to their temperaments; those of nervous people tapping quickly, of quiet people almost inaudibly, and so on. "Well, who is this?" asked Brown, and it turned out to be a repetition upon Brown of the dull guesses we had just gone through in the case of Thompson. It was the spirit of his mother. (Brown's mother, he is happy to observe here, is alive and well.) Had this spirit of the dead-and-alive anything to say? Yes. A dead-and-alive ghost was the properest for the occasion. The most interminable game at beggar-my-neighbour is not half so dull and stupid as the knocking out of long and foolish sentences from the A. B. C. D. card of a Rapper. Brown must have been regarded as a suspicious character by the Medium. The ghost of the dead-and-alive, blundering over letters, tapping back; and, leaving, after all, her sentences in a broken down condition, said to Brown, "Be candid; investigate; be careful; for this is God's work, my son."
        God's work!
        The spirit then informed Brown by the usual slow process that his mother's name was Mary; falling into a trap which Brown had laid, possibly by dwelling with the pencil over M and A and R and Y; also that she had been dead six years—all wrong.
        "I wish," said Brown, "to ask some questions concerning the future; can the spirits answer them without your knowing what they are?" "If they cannot, they will be silent," said the Medium, "sometimes they do so. Try."—"As they are questions which I should not like to ask in public. Will they see them written on paper?" "O yes."—Brown wrote down very clearly: 'Shall I soon be married?' "Will the spirits answer this question?" Rat-tat-tat. "Is Yes the answer?" Rat-tat-tat. 'How many children shall I have?' was written next, Brown saying "This is a question that must be answered in numbers. Does the spirit see it?" Rat-tat-tat. "Can it answer me?" Rat-tat-tat. And so the spirit answered by the usual process, "One Hundred and Thirty-Six." When the 1 was obtained, and then the 3 to go next to it, and then the 6 to go after that, the rapid growth of Brown's family amused Thompson, and the imminent carrying on of the sum into thousands was prevented by his ill-timed mirth. The production of children by Brown stopped therefore prematurely at the number of one hundred and thirty-six.
        The Medium, who always asked whether the answers fitted, and who aid not clearly know whether she might not be succeeding vastly, although she evidently felt a little puzzled by the sense that she was not doing so well as might be expected, was now re-assured by the reverent tone in which the too explosive Thompson asked whether the spirit of his sister were in the room. His only sister being in vigorous health, he did not expect her ghost; but it was there, and very prompt to answer him. How long had she been dead? Two years.
        So the dreary labour was continued; but we cannot fatigue our readers with the whole monotony of a sitting that was not enlivened by one happy guess.
        After two hours in the presence of the Medium and the great fire, we passed into the front drawing-room again, and paid our money. Mr. Stone trusted that we had found the spirits answering satisfactorily. It appeared to us rather probable that they did answer very satisfactorily at a guinea a head. Nevertheless we grumbled not, and listened to the further wonders that he had to tell of spirits that sometimes not only rapped, but moved heavy furniture about. He had seen a large loo table, he said, turned topsy turvy by the spirits. He told us more, and offered us gratuitously a fresh sitting, if we had not been satisfied with the first. We had seen enough. We asked for printed information, and brought home with us a pamphlet upon Spirit Knocking, which he recommended to our notice. It had the motto on the cover, "Behold, I stand at the door, and knock." Within the pamphlet we have since read of a spit that flew up a chimney, of a stirrup-iron that followed a man through a wood, and other miserable nonsense.
        Of the use of Holy Scripture in the writings of these people we abstain from saying much. We will give, however, from the pamphlet placed in our hands one example. The writer dwells, among other things, upon the account of Peter's coming after his delivery from prison and knocking at the door of Mary's house, when his friends within, who would not at first believe the servant's tidings that Peter stood at the gate, said afterwards "It is his angel." "It is evident from this," argues the Rapper's pamphlet, "that those who were gathered together praying, thought it possible for an angel to knock,"—we will quote no more of the stuff. This miserable delusion, the ghost of a dead ghost, this clumsiest of all the cheats that ever offered folly to be bolted by the greedy appetite of superstition without even the courtesy of cooking it a little, did for a short time turn the heads of thousands in America. But, even in America—the Land of Promise to the Mormons, and to many other sects of fanatics—the Rappers came at last to be generally understood after Mrs. Culver's deposition had been published; the "intense excitement in all classes of society" died out; and now this ghost of the Cock Lane Ghost, having been laid a second time, makes a third appearance, more faded than ever, and by advertisement invites "the nobility and gentry" during the present London season, to be present at its manifestations—"God's work, my son;"—nothing of the Treadmill quality in it.

Two Stories

by Ella D'Arcy.

Originally published in The Yellow Book (Bodley Head) vol.10 (Jul 1896).

I—The Death Mask

The Master was dead; and Peschi, who had come round to the studio to see about some repairs—part of the ceiling had fallen owing to the too lively proceedings of Dubourg and his eternal visitors overhead—Peschi displayed a natural pride that it was he who had been selected from among the many mouleurs of the Quarter, to take a mask of the dead man.
        All Paris was talking of the Master, although not, assuredly, under that title. All Paris was talking of his life, of his genius, of his misery, and of his death. Peschi, for the moment, was sole possessor of valuable unedited details, to the narration of which Hiram P. Corner, who had dropped in to pass the evening with me, listened with keenly attentive ears.
        Corner was a recent addition to the American Art Colony; ingenuous as befitted his eighteen years, and of a more than improbable innocence. Paris, to him, represented the Holiest of Holies; the dead Master, by the adorable impeccability of his writings, figuring therein as one of the High Priests. Needless to say, he had never come in contact with that High Priest, had never even seen him; while the Simian caricatures which so frequently embellished the newspapers, made as little impression on the lad's mind as did the unequivocal allusions, jests, and epigrams, for ever flung up like sea-spray against the rock of his unrevered name.
        The absorbing interest Corner felt glowed visibly on his fresh young western face, and it was this, I imagine, which led Peschi to propose that we should go back with him to his atelier and see the mask for ourselves.
        Peschi is a Genoese; small, lithe, very handsome; a skilled workman, a little demon of industry; full of enthusiasms, with the real artist-soul. He works for Felon the sculptor, and it was Felon who had been commissioned to do the bust for which the death mask would serve as model.
        It is always pleasant to hear Peschi talk; and to-night, as we walked from the Rue Fleurus to the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs he told us something of mask-taking in general, with illustrations from this particular case.
        On the preceding day, barely two hours after death had taken place, Rivereau, one of the dead man's intimates, had rushed into Peschi's workroom, and carried him off, with the necessary materials, to the Rue Monsieur, in a cab. Rivereau, though barely twenty, is perhaps the most notorious of the bande. Peschi described him to Corner as having dark, evil, narrow eyes set too close together in a perfectly white tace, framed by falling, lustreless black hair; and with the stooping shoulders, the troubled walk, the attenuated hands common to his class.
        Arrived at the house, Rivereau led the way up the dark and dirty staircase to the topmost landing, and as they paused there an instant, Peschi could hear the long-drawn, hopeless sobs of a woman within the door.
        On being admitted he found himself in an apartment consisting of two small, inconceivably squalid rooms, opening one from the other.
        In the outer room, five or six figures, the disciples, friends, and lovers of the dead poet, conversed together; a curious group in a medley of costumes. One in an opera-hat, shirt-sleeves, and soiled grey trousers tied up with a bit of stout string; another in a black coat buttoned high to conceal the fact that he wore no shirt at all; a third in clothes crisp from the tailor, with an immense bunch of Parma violets in his buttonhole. But all were alike in the strangeness of their eyes, their voices, their gestures.
        Seen through the open door of the further room, lay the corpse under a sheet, and by the bedside knelt the stout, middle-aged mistress, whose sobs had reached the stairs.
        Madame Germaine, as she was called in the Quarter, had loved the Master with that complete, self-abnegating, sublime love of which certain women are capable—a love uniting that of the mother, the wife, and the nurse all in one. For years she had cooked for him, washed for him, mended for him; had watched through whole nights by his bedside when he was ill; had suffered passively his blows, his reproaches, and his neglect, when, thanks to her care, he was well again. She adored him dumbly, closed her eyes to his vices, and magnified his gifts, without in the least comprehending them. She belonged to the ouvrière class, could not read, could not write her own name; but with a characteristic which is as French as it is un-British, she paid her homage to intellect, where an Englishwoman only gives it to inches and muscle. Madame Germaine was prouder perhaps of the Master's greatness, worshipped him more devoutly, than any one of the super-cultivated, ultra-corrupt group, who by their flatteries and complaisances had assisted him to his ruin.
        It was with the utmost difficulty, Peschi said, that Rivereau and the rest had succeeded in persuading the poor creature to leave the bedside and go into the other room while the mask was being taken.
        The operation, it seems, is a sufficiently horrible one, and no relative is permitted to be present. As you cover the dead face over with the plaster, a little air is necessarily forced back again into the lungs, and this air as it passes along the windpipe causes strange rattlings, sinister noises, so that you might swear that the corpse was returned to life. Then, as the mould is removed, the muscles of the face drag and twitch, the mouth opens, the tongue lolls out; and Peschi declared that this always remains for him a gruesome moment. He has never accustomed himself to it; on every recurring occasion it fills him with the same repugnance; and this, although he has taken so many masks, is so deservedly celebrated for them, that la bande had instantly selected him to perpetuate the Master's lineaments.
        "But it's an excellent likeness," said Peschi; "you see they sent for me so promptly that he had not changed at all. He does not look as though he were dead, but just asleep."
        Meanwhile we had reached the unshuttered shop-front, where Peschi displays, on Sundays and week-days alike, his finished works of plastic art to the gamins and filles of the Quarter.
        Looking past the statuary, we could see into the living-room beyond, it being separated from the shop only by a glass partition. It was lighted by a lamp set in the centre of the table, and in the circle of light thrown from beneath its green shade, we saw a charming picture: the young head of Madame Peschi bent over her baby, whom she was feeding at the breast. She is eighteen, pretty as a rose, and her story and Peschi's is an idyllic one; to be told, perhaps, another time. She greeted us with the smiling, cordial, unaffected kindliness which in France warms your blood with the constant sense of brotherhood; and, giving the boy to his father—a delicious opalescent trace of milk hanging about the little mouth—she got up to see about another lamp which Peschi had asked for.
        Holding this lamp to guide our steps, he preceded us now across a dark yard to his workshop at the further end, and while we went we heard the young mother's exquisite nonsense-talk addressed to the child, as she settled back in her place again to her nursing.
        Peschi, unlocking a door, flashed the light down a long room, the walls of which, the trestle-tables, the very floor, were hung, laden, and encumbered with a thousand heterogeneous objects. Casts of every description and dimension, finished, unfinished, broken; scrolls for ceilings; caryatides for chimney-pieces; cornucopias for the entablatures of buildings; chubby Cupids jostling emaciated Christs; broken columns for Père Lachaise, or consolatory upward-pointing angels; hands, feet, and noses for the Schools of Art; a pensively posed échorché contemplating a Venus of Milo fallen upon her back; these, and a crowd of nameless, formless things, seemed to spring at our eyes, as Peschi raised or lowered the lamp, moved it this way or the other.
        "There it is," said he, pointing forwards; and I saw lying flat upon a modelling-board, with upturned features, a grey, immobile simulacrum of the curiously mobile face I remembered so well.
        "Of course you must understand," said Peschi, "it's only in the rough, just exactly as it came from the creux. Fifty copies are to be cast altogether, and this is the first one. But I must prop it up for you. You can't judge of it as it is."
        He looked about him for a free place on which to set the lamp. Not finding any, he put it down on the floor. For a few moments he stood busied over the mask with his back to us.
        "Now you can see it properly," said he, and stepped aside.
        The lamp threw its rays upwards, illuminating strongly the lower portion of the cast, throwing the upper portion into deepest shadow, with the effect that the inanimate mask was become suddenly a living face, but a face so unutterably repulsive, so hideously bestial, that I grew cold to the roots of my hair. . . . . A fat, loose throat, a retreating chinless chin, smeared and bleared with the impressions of the meagre beard; a vile mouth, lustful, flaccid, the lower lip disproportionately great; ignoble lines; hateful puffiness; something inhuman and yet worse than inhuman in its travesty of humanity; something that made you hate the world and your fellows, that made you hate yourself for being ever so little in this image. A more abhorrent spectacle I have never seen. . . . .
        So soon as I could turn my eyes from the ghastly thing, I looked at Corner. He was white as the plaster faces about him. His immensely opened eyes showed his astonishment and his terror. For what I experienced was intensified in his case by the unexpected and complete disillusionment. He had opened the door of the tabernacle, and out had crawled a noisome spider; he had lifted to his lips the communion cup, and therein squatted a toad. A sort of murmur of frantic protestation began to rise in his throat; but Peschi, unconscious of our agitation, now lifted the lamp, passed round with it behind the mask, held it high, and let the rays stream downwards from above.
        The astounding way the face changed must have been seen to be believed in. It was exactly as though, by some cunning sleight of hand, the mask of a god had been substituted for that of a satyr. . . . . You saw a splendid dome-like head, Shakespearean in contour; a broad, smooth, finely-modelled brow; thick, regular horizontal eyebrows, casting a shadow which diminished the too great distance separating them from the eyes; while the deeper shadow thrown below the nose altered its character entirely. Its snout-like appearance was gone, its deep, wide-open, upturned nostrils were hidden, but you noticed the well-marked transition from forehead to nose-base, the broad ridge denoting extraordinary mental power. Over the eyeballs the lids had slidden down smooth and creaseless; the little tell-tale palpebral wrinkles which had given such libidinous lassitude to the eye had vanished away. The lips no longer looked gross, and they closed together in a beautiful, sinuous line, now first revealed by the shadow on the upper one. The prominence of the jaws, the muscularity of the lower part of the face, which gave it so painfully microcephalous an appearance, were now unnoticeable; on the contrary, the whole face looked small beneath the noble head and brow. You remarked the medium-sized and well-formed ears, with the "swan" distinct in each, the gently-swelling breadth of head above them, the full development of the forehead over the orbits of the eyes. You discerned the presence of those higher qualities which might have rendered him an ascetic or a saint; which led him to understand the beauty of self-denial, to appreciate the wisdom of self-restraint: and you did not see how these qualities remained inoperative in him, being completely overbalanced by the size of the lower brain, the thick, bull throat, and the immense length trom the ear to the base of the skull at the back.
        I had often seen the Master in life: I had seen him sipping absinthe at the d'Harcourt; reeling, a Silemus-like figure, among the nocturnal Bacchantes of the Boul' Miche; lying in the gutter outside his house, until his mistress should come to pick him up and take him in. I had seen in the living man more traces than a few of the bestiality which the death-mask had completely verified; but never in the living man had I suspected anything of the beauty, of the splendour, that I now saw.
        For that the Master had somewhere a beautiful soul you divined from his works; from the exquisite melody of all of them, from the pure, the ecstatic, the religious altitude of some few. But in actual daily life, his loose and violent will-power, his insane passions, held that soul bound down so close a captive, that those who knew him best were the last to admit its existence.
        And here, a mere accident of lighting displayed not only that existence, but its visible, outward expression as well. In these magnificent lines and arches of head and brow, you saw what the man might have been, what God had intended him to be; what his mother had foreseen in him, when, a tiny infant like Peschi's yonder, she had cradled the warm, downy, sweet-smelling little head upon her bosom, and dreamed day-dreams of all the high, the great, the wonderful things her boy later on was todo. You saw what the poor, purblind, middle-aged mistress was the only one to see in the seamed and ravaged face she kissed so tenderly for the last time before the coffin-lid was closed.
        You saw the head of gold; you could forget the feet of clay, or, remembering them, you found for the first time some explanation of the anomalies of his career.
        You understood how he who could pour out passionate protestations of love and devotion to God in the morning, offering up body and soul, flesh and blood in his service; dedicating his brow as a footstool for the Sacred Feet; his hands as censers for the glowing coals, the precious incense; condemning his eyes, misleading lights, to be extinguished by the tears of prayer; you understood how, nevertheless, before evening was come, he would set every law of God and decency at defiance, use every member, every faculty, in the service of sin.
        It was given to him, as it is given to few, to see the Best, to reverence it, to love it; and the blind, groping hesitatingly forward in the darkness, do not stray as far as he strayed.
        He knew the value of work, its imperative necessity; that in the sweat of his brow the artist, like the day-labourer, must produce, must produce: and he spent his slothful days shambling from café to café.
        He never denied his vices; he recognised them and found excuses for them, high moral reasons even, as the intellectual man can always do. To indulge them was but to follow out the dictates of Nature, who in herself is holy; cynically to expose them to the world was but to be absolutely sincere.
        And his disciples, going further, taught with a vague poetic mysticism that he was a fresh Incarnation of the Godhead; that what was called his immorality was merely his scorn of truckling to the base conventions of the world. But in his saner moments he described himself more accurately as a man blown hither and thither by the winds of evil chance, just as a withered leaf is blown in autumn; and having received great and exceptional gifts, with Shakespeare's length of years in which to turn them to account, he had chosen instead to wallow in such vileness that his very name was anathema among honourable men.
        Chosen? Did he choose? Can one say after all that he chose to resemble the leaf rather than the tree? The gates of gifts close on the child with the womb, and all we possess comes to us from afar, and is collected from a thousand diverging sources.
        If that splendid head and brow were contained in the seed, so also were the retreating chin, the debased jaw, the animal mouth. One as much as the other was the direct inheritance of former generations. Considered in a certain aspect, it seems that a man by taking thought, may as little hope to thwart the implanted propensities of his character, as to alter the shape of his skull or the size of his jawbone.
        I lost myself in mazes of predestination and free-will. Life appeared to me as a huge kaleidoscope turned by the hand of Fate. The atoms of glass coalesce into patterns, fall apart, unite together again, are always the same, but always different, and, shake the glass never so slightly, the precise combination you have just been looking at is broken up for ever. It can never be repeated. This particular man, with his faults and his virtues, his unconscious brutalities, his unexpected gentlenesses, his furies of remorse; this man with the lofty brain, the perverted tastes, the weak, irresolute, indulgent heart, will never again be met with to the end of time; in all the endless combinations to come, this precise combination will never be found. Just as of all the faces the world will see, a face like the mask there will never again exchange glances with it. . . . .
        I looked at Corner, and saw his countenance once more aglow with the joy of a recovered ideal; while Peschi's voice broke in on my reverie, speaking with the happy pride of the artist in a good and conscientious piece of work.
        "Eh bien, how do you find it?" said he; "it is beautiful, is it not?"

II—The Villa Lucienne

Madame Coetlegon told the story, and told it so well, that her audience seemed to know the sombre alley, the neglected garden, the shuttered house, as intimately as though they had visited it themselves; seemed to feel a faint reverberation of the incommunicable thrill which she had felt,—which the surly guardian, the torn rag of lace, the closed pavilion had made her feel. And yet, as you will see, there is in reality no story at all; it is merely an account of how, when in the Riviera two winters ago, she went with some friends to look over a furnished villa, which one of them thought of taking.

        It was afternoon when we started on our expedition, Madame de M—, Cécile her widowed daughter-in-law, and I. Cécile's little girl Renée, the nurse, and Médor, the boarhound of which poor Guy had been so inordinately fond, dawdled after us up the steep and sunny road.
        The December day was deliciously blue and warm. Cécile took off her furs and carried them over her arm. We only put down our sunshades when a screen of olive-trees on the left interposed their grey-green foliage between the sunshine and us.
        Up in these trees barefooted men armed with bamboos were beating the branches to knock down the fruit; and three generations of women, grandmothers, wives, and children, knelt in the grass, gathering up the little purplish olives into baskets. All paused to follow us with black persistent eyes, as we passed by; only the men went on working unmoved. The tap-tapping, swish-swishing, of their light sticks against the boughs played a characteristically southern accompaniment to our desultory talk.
        We were reasonably happy, pleasantly exhilarated by the beauty of the weather and the scene. Renée and Médor, with shrill laughter and deep-mouthed joy-notes, played together the whole way. And when the garden wall, which now replaced the olivetrees upon our right, gave place to a couple of iron gates standing open upon a broad straight drive, and we, looking up between the overarching palm-trees and cocoanuts, saw a white, elegant, sun-bathed house at the end, Cécile jumped to the conclusion that here was the Villa Lucienne, and that nowhere else could she find a house which on the face of it would suit her better.
        But the woman who came to greet us, the jocund, brown-faced young woman, with the superb abundance of bosom beneath her crossed neckkerchief of orange-coloured wool, told us no; this was the Villa Soleil (appropriate name!) and belonged to Monsieur Morgera, the deputy, who was now in Paris. The Villa Lucienne was higher up; she pointed vaguely behind her through the house: a long walk round by the road. But if these ladies did not mind a path which was a trifle damp perhaps, owing to Monday's rain, they would find themselves in five minutes at the Villa, for the two houses in reality were not more than a stone's-throw apart.
        She conducted us across a spacious garden golden with sunshine, lyric with bird-song, brilliant with flowers, where eucalyptus, mimosa, and tea-roses interwove their strong and subtle perfumes through the air, to an angle in a remote laurel hedge. Here she stooped to pull aside some ancient pine-boughs which ineffectually closed the entrance to a dark and trellised walk. Peering up it, it seemed to stretch away interminably into green gloom, the ground rising a little all the while, and the steepness of the ascent being modified every here and there by a couple of rotting wooden steps.
        We were to go up this alley, our guide told us, and we would be sure to find Laurent at the top. Laurent, she explained to us, was the gardener who lived at the Villa Lucienne and showed it to visitors. But there were not many who came, although it had been to let an immense time, ever since the death of old Madame Gray, and that had occurred before she, the speaker, had come south with the Morgeras. We were to explain to Laurent that we had been sent up from the Villa Soleil, and then it would be all right. For he sometimes used the alley himself, as it gave him a short cut into Antibes; but the passage had been blocked up many years ago, to prevent the Morgera children running into it.
        Oh, Madame was very kind, it was no trouble at all, and of course if these ladies liked they could return by the alley also; but once they found themselves at the Villa they would be close to the upper road, which they would probably prefer. Then came her cordial voice calling after Cécile, "Madame had best put on her furs again, it is cold in there."
        It was cold, and damp, too, with the damp coldness of places where sun and wind never penetrate. It was so narrow that we had to walk in single file. The walls close on either hand, the low roof above our heads, were formed of trellised woodwork now dropping into complete decay. But these might have been removed altogether, and the alley would still have retained its form; for the creepers which overgrew it had with time developed gnarled trunks and branches, which formed a second natural tunnelling outside. Through the broken places in the woodwork we could see the thick, inextricably twisted stems; and outside again was a tangled matting of greenery that suffered no drop of sunlight to trickle through. The ground was covered with lichens, deathstool, and a spongy moss exuding water beneath the foot, and one had the consciousness that the whole place, floor, walls, and roof, must creep with the repulsive, slimy, running life which pullulates in dark and solitary places.
        The change from the gay and scented garden to this dark alley, heavy with the smells of moisture and decay, was curiously depressing. We followed each other in silence; first Cécile; then Renée clinging to her nurse's hand, with Médor pressing close against them; Madame de M-- next; and I brought up the rear.
        One would have pronounced it impossible to find in any southern garden so sombre a place, but that, after all, it is only in the south that such extraordinary contrasts of gaiety and gloom ever present themselves.
        The sudden tearing away of a portion of one of the wooden steps beneath my tread startled us all, and the circular scatter of an immense colony of wood-lice that had formed its habitat in the crevices of the wood filled me with shivering disgust. I was exceedingly glad when we emerged from the tunnel upon daylight again and the Villa.
        Upon daylight, but not upon sunlight, for the small garden in which we found ourselves was ringed round by the compact tops of the umbrella-pines which climbed the hill on every side. The site had been chosen of course on account of the magnificent view which we knew must be obtainable from the Villa windows, though from where we stood we could see nothing but the dark trees, the wild garden, the overshadowed house. And we saw none of these things very distinctly, for our attention was focussed on the man standing stolidly there in the middle of the garden, and evidently knee-deep in the grass, awaiting us.
        He was a short, thick-set peasant, dressed in the immensely wide blue velveteen trousers, the broad crimson sash, and the flannel shirt, open at the throat, which are customary in these parts. He was strong-necked as a bull, dark as a mulatto, and his curling, grizzled hair was thickly matted over head and face and breast. He wore a flat knitted cap, and held the inevitable cigarette between his lips, but he made no attempt to remove one or the other at our approach. He stood motionless, silent, his hands thrust deep into his pockets, staring at us, and shifting from one to another his suspicious and truculent little eyes.
        So far as I was concerned, and though the Villa had proved a palace, I should have preferred abandoning the quest at once to going over it in his company; but Cécile addressed him with intrepid politeness.
        "We had been permitted to come up from the Villa Soleil. We understood that the Villa Lucienne was to let furnished; if so, might we look over it?"
        From his heavy, expressionless expression, one might have supposed that the very last thing he expected or desired was to find a tenant for the Villa, and I thought with relief that he was going to refuse Cécile's request. But, after a longish pause: "Yes, you can see it," he said grudgingly, and turned from us, to disappear into the lower part of the house.
        We looked into each other's disconcerted faces, then round the grey and shadowy garden in which we stood: a garden long since gone to ruin, with paths and flower-beds inextricably mingled, with docks and nettles choking up the rose-trees run wild, with wind-planted weeds growing from the stone vases on the terrace, with grasses pushing between the marble steps leading up to the hall door.
        In the middle of the garden a terra-cotta faun, tumbled from his pedestal, grinned sardonically up from amidst the tangled greenery, and Madame de M-- began to quote:

                "Un vieux faune en terre-cuite
                Rit au centre des boulingrins,
                Présageant sans doute une fuite
                De ce. instants sereins
                Qui m'ont conduit et t'ont conduite . . ."

        The Villa itself was as dilapidated, as mournful-looking as the garden. The ground-floor alone gave signs of occupation, in a checked shirt spread out upon a window-ledge to dry, in a worn besom, an earthenware pipkin, and a pewter jug, ranged against the wall. But the upper part, with the yellow plaster crumbling from the walls, the grey-painted persiennes all monotonously closed, said with a thousand voices it was never opened, never entered, had not been lived in for years.
        Our surly gardener reappeared, carrying some keys. He led the way up the steps. We exchanged mute questions; all desire to inspect the Villa was gone. But Cécile isa woman of character; she devoted herself.
        "I'll just run up and see what it is like," she said; "it's not worth while you should tire yourself too, Mamma. You, all, wait here."
        We stood at the foot of the steps; Laurent was already at the top. Cécile began to mount lightly towards him, but before she was half-way she turned, and to our surprise, "I wish you would come up all of you," she said, and stopped there until we joined her.
        Laurent fitted a key to the door, and it opened with a shriek of rusty hinges. As he followed us, pulling it to behind him, we found ourselves in total darkness. I assure you I went through a bad quarter of a minute. Then we heard the turning of a handle, an inner door was opened, and in the semi-daylight of closed shutters we saw the man's squat figure going from us down a long, old-fashioned, vacant drawing-room towards two windows at the further end.
        At the same instant Renée burst into tears:
        "Oh, I don't like it. Oh, I'm frightened!" she sobbed.
        "Little goosie!" said her grandmother, "see, it's quite light now!" for Laurent had pushed back the persiennes, and a magical panorama had sprung into view; the whole range of the mountains behind Nice, their snow-caps suffused with a heavenly rose colour by the setting sun.
        But Renée only clutched tighter at Madame de M--'s gown, and wept:
        "Oh, I don't like it, Bonnemaman! She is looking at me still. I want to go home!"
        "No one is looking at you," her grandmother told her, "talk to your friend Médor. He'll take care of you."
        But Renée whispered:
        "He wouldn't come in; he's frightened too."
        And, listening, we heard the dog's impatient and complaining bark calling to us from the garden.
        Cécile sent Renée and the nurse to join him, and while Laurent let them out, we stepped on to the terrace, and for a moment our hearts were eased by the incomparable beauty of the view, for raised now above the tree-tops, we looked over the admirable bay, the illimitable sky; we feasted our eyes upon unimaginable colour, upon matchless form. We were almost prepared to declare that the possession of the Villa was a piece of good fortune not to be let slip, when we heard a step behind us, and turned to see Laurent surveying us morosely from the window threshold, and again to experience the oppression of his ungenial personality. Under his guidance we now inspected the century-old furniture, the faded silks, the tarnished gilt, the ragged brocades, which had once embellished the room. The oval mirrors were dim with mildew, the parquet floor might have been a mere piece of grey drugget, so thick was the overlying dust. Curtains, yellowish, ropey, of undeterminable material, hung forlornly where once they had draped windows and doors. Originally they may have been of rose satin, for there were traces of rose colour still on the walls and the ceiling, painted in gay southern fashion with loves and doves, festoons of flowers, and knots of ribbons. But these paintings were all fragmentary, indistinct, seeming to lose sequence and outline the more diligently you tried to decipher them.
        Yet you could not fail to see that when first furnished the room must have been charming and coquettish. I wondered for whom it had been thus arranged, why it had been thus abandoned. For there grew upon me, I cannot tell you why, the curious conviction that the last inhabitant of the room having casually left it, had, from some unexpected obstacle, never again returned. They were but the merest trifles that created this idea; the tiny heaps of brown ash which lay on a marble guéridon, the few withered twigs in the vase beside it, spoke of the last rose plucked from the garden; the big berceuse chair drawn out beside the sculptured mantelpiece seemed to retain the impression of the last occupant; andin the dark recesses of the unclosed hearth my fancy detected smouldering heat in the half-charred logs of wood.
        The other rooms in the villa resembled the salon; each time our surly guide opened the shutters we saw a repetition of the ancient furniture, of the faded decoration; everything dustcovered and time-decayed. Nor in these other rooms was any sign of former occupation to be seen, until, caught upon the girandole of a pier-glass, a long ragged fragment of lace seized my eye; an exquisitely fine and cobwebby piece of lace, as though caught and torn from some gala shawl or flounce, as the wearer had hurried by.
        It was odd perhaps to see this piece of lace caught thus, but not odd enough surely to account for the strange emotion which seized hold of me: an overwhelming pity, succeeded by an overwhelming fear. I had had a momentary intention to point the lace out to the others, but a glance at Laurent froze the words on my lips. Never in my life have I experienced such a paralysing fear. I was filled with an intense desire to get away from the man and from the Villa.
        But Madame de M— looking from the window, had noticed a pavilion standing isolated in the garden. She inquired if it were to be let with the house. Then she supposed we could visit it. No, said the man, that was impossible. But she insisted it was only right that tenants should see the whole of the premises for which they would have to pay, but he refused this time with such rudeness, his little brutish eyes narrowed with such malignancy, that the panic which I had just experienced now seized the others, and it was a sauve-qui-peut.
        We gathered up Renée, nurse, and Médor in our hasty passage through the garden, and found our way unguided to the gate upon the upper road.
        And once at large beneath the serene evening sky, winding slowly westward down the olive bordered ways: "What an odious old ruffian!" said one; "What an eerie, uncanny place!" said another. We compared notes. We found that each of us had been conscious of the same immense, the same inexplicable sense of fear.
        Cécile, the least nervous of women, had felt it the first. It had laid hold of her when going up the steps to the door, and it had been so real a terror, she explained to us, that if we had not joined her she would have turned back. Nothing could have induced her to enter the Villa alone.
        Madame de M—'s account was that her mind had been more or less troubled from the first moment of entering the garden, but that when the man refused us access to the pavilion, it had been suddenly invaded by a most intolerable sense of something wrong. Being very imaginative (poor Guy undoubtedly derived his extraordinary gifts from her), Madame de M-- was convinced that the gardener had murdered some one and buried the body inside the pavilion.
        But for me it was not so much the personality of the man—although I admitted he was unprepossessing enough—as the Villa itself which inspired fear. Fear seemed to exude from the walls, to dim the mirrors with its clammy breath, to stir shudderingly among the tattered draperies, to impregnate the whole atmosphere as with an essence, a gas, a contagious disease. You fought it off for a shorter or longer time, according to your powers of resistance, but you were bound to succumb to it at last. The oppressive and invisible fumes had laid hold of us one after the other, and the incident of the closed pavilion had raised our terrors to a ludicrous pitch.
        Nurse's experiences, which she gave us a day or two later, supported this view. For she told us that when Renée began to cry, and she took her hand to lead her out, all at once she felt quite nervous and uncomfortable too, as though the little one's trouble had passed by touch into her.
        "And what is strange too," said she, "when we reached the garden, there was Médor, his forepaws planted firmly on the ground, his whole body rigid, and his hair bristling all along his backbone from end to end."
        Nurse was convinced that both the child and the dog had seen something we others could not see.
        This reminded us of a word of Renée's, a very curious word:
        "I don't like it, she is looking at me still,"—and Cécile undertook to question her.
        "You remember, Renée, when mother took you the other day to look over the pretty Villa--"
        Renée opened wide, mute eyes.
        "Why did you cry?"
        "I was frightened of the lady," she whispered.
        "Where was the lady?" asked Cécile.
        "She was in the drawing-room, sitting in the big chair."
        "Was she an old lady like grandmamma, or a young lady like mother?"
        "She was like Bonnemaman," said Renée, and her little mouth began to quiver.
        "And what did she do?"
        "She got up and began to—to come—"
        But here Renée burst into tears again. And as she is a very nervous, excitable child, we had to drop the subject.
        But what it all meant, whether there was anything in the history of the house or of its guardian which could account for our sensations, we never knew. We made inquiries of course concerning Laurent and the Villa Lucienne, but we learned very little, and that little was so vague, so remote, so irrelevant, that it does not seem worth while repeating.
        The indisputable fact is the overwhelming fear which the adventure awoke in each and all of us; and this effect is impossible to describe, being just the crystallisation ot one of those subtle, unformulated emotions in which only poor Guy himself could have hoped to succeed.

The One Talent; or "What Can I Do?"

A Story for All.

Originally published in The Leisure Hour (Religious Tract Society) vol.1 #3 (15 Jan 1852).

In an upper chamber of a large, dreary, old-fashioned house, in one of our ancient cities—a house once occupied by the rich and noble, but now so far fallen into decay, as to be let off in separate apartments to the working classes; in an upper room of this same old house, a sad and lonely woman sate thoughtfully at her evening meal. And, as is often the custom of these lonely ones, she thought aloud; and her reflections were very much after this fashion.
"Well, the day's work is over, and Saturday will be here presently; let me see—" And she turned out of an old canvas bag all her worldly wealth. There were several halfpence, amounting to tenpence in all, a sixpence, a shilling, and a halfcrown piece. This was her bank.
        There was part of a quartern loaf in her closet, and perhaps an ounce of tea in her caddy, a little dripping in a broken basin, a herring on a plate, and some liquor in which beef had been boiled, given to her with the dripping at a house where she had worked that day. This was her provision-store.
There was a very little handful of fire in the grate, and about a moderate-sized coal-shoot of coals in her cellar or coal-close, with a few sticks that a little girl had given her. This was her provision of firing.
        There was a bed in a corner of the room, a small tent bedstead without hangings, and covered with a very thin hard mattress, an old but clean and well-mended blanket, and a blue coverlet. These were her sleeping quarters. An old rush-bottomed chair, and a little round mahogany table—a relic of better days, a tea tray, a crazy chest of drawers, and a looking-glass without a frame, about four inches square, a very tattered rug, a high-backed old-fashioned chair, the bequest of the widow's grandmother, and a stool, constituted the remainder of her scanty possessions.
        She might well sigh, then, as she turned out the money into her lap, remembering the three shillings due for a fortnight's rent, the dearness of provisions (for it was a time of scarcity), the slackness of work, and her own friendless condition.
        She sipped her weak tea, and spread a morsel of her stale loaf with the welcome dripping, and murmured, "But it wont do to doubt; I must think of the promise, that my bread will be given me and my water will be sure, if I trust in my Father. Yet it is close work to come, as I shall do to-morrow, almost to my last shilling; and it is difficult just at the right time to think of the good words which Briant read to me last night—'Seek first the kingdom of heaven and its righteousness and all things needful shall be added unto you.' Good Briant! I wonder he is not come yet; but it is a cheery evening, and may-be he is strolled into the country for a breath of pure air after his hard day's work; and if I were not so dead tired, that's what I should have done myself; but standing all day to wash is not the way to be able to take country walks. But who's that coming up? I should not wonder now if that was Briant, after all;" and she peeped out.
        No, it was only the surly porter from the wool-staplers, who always came home very dirty; often, she feared, tipsy, and not often so early as he did to-night. He was a solitary man; but he never took any notice of her, often as she met him on the stairs; and on the present occasion, when she could scarcely refrain from bidding him "good night," he replied by a growl; so she shut the door and resolved to give up Briant. "If it were not for my bad eyes, how I should love to read that best of books to-night," said she, as she looked on the Bible; "but He who has afflicted me with weak and failing sight, has perhaps better blessings for me than the indulgence even of this wish."
        So saying, she began to put away her cup and saucer and the little black tea-pot, and ascertaining from the nature of the last cup of tea that no more flavour was to be extracted from the leaves, she put them aside for their last service, that of sweeping her chamber on the morrow, and sate down by the little high window to catch the rays of the bright setting sun.
        A step was heard again, and this time she was not disappointed; it was Briant.
        Briant was a pale, thin, over-worked, underfed-looking youth of eighteen years, the journeyman of a painter in the town; and he gave evidence, as most journeymen painters do, of the unhealthiness of his daily employment. To have employment at all, however, was no light mercy at a time of great pressure and poverty, and Briant did not complain.
        "I scarcely expected you to-night," said Mrs. Warner, looking a grateful welcome into his face; "I thought the first evening after all the wet weather we have had would have tempted you beyond the city walls."
        "Oh no, no, my pleasure and my duty are within the city walls, and I have a whole hour to spare to read with you and poor old Susan Clarke, before I must turn homewards."
        The book was opened accordingly, a little well-worn plainly-bound Bible, which the young man drew out of his pocket; and with unaffected solemnity he began to read the parable of the Talents. He did not comment much upon it, for, as he truly said, "The Gospel was its own interpreter, and the lesson to be derived from that simple and beautiful story was too obvious to need much explanation."
        But the widow did not look satisfied, and lifting up her hands, and then in a hopeless and desponding attitude, letting them fall on the lap, she said: "But what—what can I do? Surely, Briant, I have not even the one talent."
        Briant smiled. "You don't think, Mrs. Warnes, that the talent means simply money, do you?"
        "No, oh no."
        "Nor simply intellect or education?"
        "Well, I don't know, but I feel I have not much of either."
        "Not much; well, then you are the possessor of the one talent—the half talent, if you will; but still you have something committed to you. To one, God gives great riches in charge; to another, little money, but great power of mind; to another, great activity and strength of body; to another, very little of anything. Now it matters little the amount that we have. He will ask of us the amount that we use."
        "Ah well, well, but still, Briant, you would be puzzled to find my talent. It is not in my purse, I know," said she, taking out the little canvas bag, and shaking it at him. "Not in my head, I am sure; and my poor body, that is not very strong, alack! No, no, my dear lad, I am a poor lone woman, of no use to anybody, and it often is passing strange to me, when I see the father taken from the family, the mother from the helpless babe, the child from the fond parent—all followed to the grave by weeping mourners, that a poor disconsolate, lonely, unloved creature like me should be left, for whom they would have to beg mock-mourners to follow to the grave."
        "This is not quite as it should be, is it, Mrs. Warnes? You must have hid your talent somewhere. Every being in God's universe has a part to perform—a work to do. But, I am very sorry to find my time is up; we cannot pursue this subject any further now. I leave you to think over it. Good night."
        Mrs. Warnes was a widow, and, as she said, a very lone and disconsolate widow. She was one of that class of poor people who rather pique themselves on 'neighbouring,' as they call it, with no one. She had known better days, and could not stoop, as she said, to become the companion of the very poor and ignorant creatures amongst whom her lot was cast. She just existed in the world, but the pleasures of friendly association, she never tasted. Yet she was by no means a cold or hardhearted woman. But she was very poor, and poverty is a crushing, deadening thing. She had lost heart for everything, and so long as she could earn enough by washing and charing to get daily bread, she was content. When she could earn no more, and that hour was even threatened, she must go to the workhouse, she said, and that was all.
        Still she had long known the truth, and she loved it in a measure. She thought she had loved it better in by-gone days, when her heart was less sore and aching, and her path less difficult; but she loved it still. Yet she was not a happy Christian, and every one who looked at poor widow Warnes marked her as a woman of a sorrowful spirit; and she was not a happy Christian just because she was not an active one; she occupied no place in the great human family which a mere animal might not have filled as well. She hid her Lord's money.
        The pale thoughtful visitor who had just passed from her threshold had little cause to be happier than widow Warnes. He had an idle, heartless father, a careful but cross-tempered step-mother, little brother and sisters of the second family, and one only sister of the first; and she was his earthly all. There was something beautiful in their love; it was the love "born of sorrow," which, as the poet says, like sorrow is true. The poor girl gained her living by the use of her needle at home, where she also made herself useful by tending the younger children.
        Briant's acquaintance with Mrs. Warnes began at a house where she was in the habit of washing, and where she was lamenting, in his hearing, her inability to read as she used to do. Briant accompanied her home that night, and when arrived at the foot of the staircase of her lodgings, he said:—"Mrs. Warnes, if you would like me to come in and read to you now and then, only say so, and I shall indeed be very glad."
        She turned round in surprise. "I have lived here some years," she said, "and yours is the first friendly voice that has fallen on my ear. You must mean well; you can have no interest in it, I am sure. I am very, very poor, I cannot even pay you by a mouthful of food; but I should be glad. The Bible is my greatest comfort, but I cannot see to read mine, as its print is so bad."
        So, after a little more talk, it was agreed that Briant should call after work was over the next night; and from that hour his visit was accounted the happiest and brightest hour of the day.
        Mrs. Warnes did not as usual, on the occasion to which we have referred, put out her candle and go to bed after her visitor's departure. She felt almost offended with him; she should have felt so to any one else at least; but Briant was a great favourite, and he had been very kind to her. But then he was very young. "What could he mean? She have a talent indeed! Why she had none; and if she had, where was the use of it? Who knew, who cared for her? The bluff old porter opposite—why he never gave her a civil answer when she did speak. The woman with the host of children, on the next floor—why she scarcely knew her name, and such dirty people they were, it was not to be expected she could mix up with them, and what good would it do if she did? The dress-maker's girl, with her flaunting flighty airs, and tawdry dress—no; she was not come to that; she could not associate with such people. And thus soliloquizing, she prepared to lie down on her solitary pillow; but she did not feel at all happy, as she could not rest for the question which lay on her heart almost like a nightmare—"What can I do?" To which Conscience, being fairly awake, replied most unhesitatingly, "Something."
        She was going forth to her work at seven the next morning, with a growing suspicion in her mind that her talent must be somewhere, though maybe a little rusty and stiff for want of use; when a girl stood in the doorway—a little dirty slipshod creature—Mrs. Warnes' particular aversion—with her hair in papers, and her dress disordered as usual, but nevertheless, with her blue glass bead necklace tied with dirty tape round her dirtier neck.
        "Will you let me pass?" asked the widow, somewhat shortly.
        The child turned her face piteously up to the speaker, and said imploringly, "Oh, mother's so bad; she's been bad all night; and father's gone for the doctor, and I'm so frightened that I've come away."
        "And have you left your mother alone?"
        "Yes, except the children."
        The widow turned round:—"May I come in?" she said, knocking at the door, which stood ajar.
        She was answered by a female voice; and now she saw that her work, even with an empty purse and very little scholarship, was plain before her.
        The poor woman whom she had put down in her list, as one of the impossible associates, had risen from her bed, and was sitting by the fire half-dressed, shivering with cold, and almost unable to support herself in her chair. The little unwashed tribe of children, some dressed, some undressed, all wretchedly dirty, were crouching in a corner, with the exception of the youngest child, a baby of six months' old, at the breast, who cried piteously for the nourishment that its fainting mother could no longer afford. The cause of the little girl's terror was apparent enough. The mother in a fit of coughing had raised a large quantity of blood, and the sight of blood drove the little ones crying away. The husband, for the first time, took alarm at a cough which had gone through and through Mr. Warnes' head many a time, she said, and now ran for the doctor; and this was the sphere of the useless widow's first labour for others.
        "But I shall lose my day's work," thought she with regret; and it was a natural thought. "I shall lose my day's work, and perhaps, if I don't go, it will not be to-day's alone, but other days."
        The poor sufferer might have guessed what was passing in the widow's mind, for at this very moment she said in a trembling and agitated voice: "Do not leave me just yet; the doctor can't be very long, and I am so frightened."
        "So the widow despatched the little slip-shod girl to the house of her employer, with the necessary explanation and apologies for her non-appearance, and then sate by her neighbour's chair, trying to soothe her fears and the baby's cries.
        The simple performance of an act of humanity, or charity; the mere turning of the heart towards the distress of another, is sure to beget something like love. It is an old saying, that "pity is akin to love;" but it is a question if true pity, benevolent Christian compassion, be not love itself. Mrs. Warnes had not sate many minutes beside the poor invalid before she took her hand in hers, and felt her heart glow with interest and compassion in a manner very unusual to her. Indeed so absorbed was she in consideration of the forlorn state of the room and the air of disorder that met her eye, that she forgot the loss of her day's work, and consequently of her daily bread. She had just succeeded in getting the patient on to her uncomfortable bed, in wrapping the baby up in a shawl, and committing it to the care of the little nurse, its sister, for an hour's airing, when the husband and the doctor entered, the former of whom looked more surprised than pleased at the presence of Mrs. Warnes.
        She had always carried herself so distantly towards her neighbours that this was not astonishing. But on this occasion there was a tenderness in her voice and a humility in her manner, as she told the man that she was prepared to stay with his wife that day if he desired it, that conciliated his goodwill at once. And oh how happy she felt when he acquiesced! how lightened her heart was when she recalled the conversation of the preceding night, and it struck her that she had brought to the light of day her hidden and long-neglected talent. Yet those who have never tried to make such a sacrifice can have no idea of its extent. Whilst she sate by that sick bed, when the children were gone out, and the sufferer, by the aid of a narcotic, had falled into a short sleep, she had time to think; and when she remembered her rent, her lost day's work, and maybe her lost place, she asked herself this question, "Can God require this of me, so poor and needy as I am?"
        It was a sharp struggle, and when Mrs. Parnell awoke, she said very kindly, "I have put your room as comfortable as I can, and I will stay with you all day and welcome, if you know of no one else; but have you no mother, nor any relative or friend, who could come in and nurse you? I would gladly do it myself, but as I have a hard living to earn, you wont wonder that I am a little anxious to get to work."
        The poor woman thus addressed, raised herself on her elbow, and, after a fit of coughing, said:—"My mother! bless you, she lives in London. I have no one here about that I can think of just now; but oh, don't leave me to-day, and I'll ask John. Perhaps one of his sisters would come, or old Mrs. Grant; but, dear me! she is so fidgety with the children. Oh, dear, dear," she cried, petulantly, "and can't you stop?"
        When Mrs. Warnes saw the feverish excitement of the patient's manner, she regretted having referred to the subject, and could now only soothe her like a wayward child, with the promise that she would not neglect her until some one else could be procured.
        It was a harder task than even she had calculated on to perform her promise. It was an ill-ordered household; the children were unruly and fretful; the chimney smoked, the patient coughed, the baby screamed incessantly, and by the time the husband came in from work at the dinner hour her patience was almost gone.
        Whilst the husband and children were at dinner, she went to the door to watch for Briant passing to his noon-day meal, and glad enough was she to see him to tell him her perplexity, and to ask—grey-haired woman as she was—the counsel of this youthful man.
        "I will consider of it," he said; "and when I call in the evening I will tell you whether I can find any one to help you in the nursing of the poor woman. And do you think she would see me, for I fear she has sadly neglected the 'one thing needful?'"
        "I don't know, indeed, her heart seems set on this world, poor thing. I will ask her; but some one, Briant, must be got to nurse her; I can't lose my living, you know."
        "'Sufficient unto the day is the' duty 'thereof,' Mrs. Warnes, and surely you cannot leave her to-day."
        Mrs. Warnes thought Briant rather cool on the subject. When he was gone she went up into her solitary chamber (and how dear its solitude and neatness were, after the confusion below), to consider what she should do.
        At present her conduct to the poor woman had been merely the charity of impulse; now the time was come for her to be charitable from principle. So she lifted up her heart to God, asking Him to help her in her difficult path of self-denial, putting up the humble petition that He who clothed the grass and careth for the sparrow, would not forget her, a poor, needy, dependent creature. And so, having dried her tears, she went out of her little room, comforted and strengthened.
        The work was not easy now; but it was easier. She was acting from principle, not from mere impulsive compassion; and, leaving the morrow's cares for the morrow, she began heartily and systematically to do the day's duty and work. The children being much in the way, she resolved, though at a great sacrifice of inclination and feeling, to turn them into her neat little upper chamber, only first requiring of them that they should not make havoc of her household treasures, and giving Jenny especial directions to make free use of some soap and water while there.
        It is beautiful to observe how the poor help one another in cases of sickness and affliction. The patient very justly observed to her husband, that she did not know she had such friends as she discovered that day. For besides the attentions of Mrs. Warnes, one poor woman who lived on the opposite side of the street brought in a little broth; she had gone without her dinner for the sake of that offering. A second, who could scarcely walk from age and infirmity, came to offer her services to watch at night; and a third, the most welcome of all, and perhaps the most self-denying, volunteered to take the crying, wailing baby, to tend and to wean, that its mother might enjoy better rest.
        Ah, you who have never studied the character of the poorer classes—poorer in worldly wealth than ourselves, but richer, maybe, in pure disinterested benevolence—is there not a page in their simple annals that it may profit you to read? For a friend you may be willing to perform the offices of affection in times of sorrow and affliction. You might perhaps offer to sit up a night to watch or to nurse, and you might even take the burden of a crying child on you to secure that friend rest and sleep; but do we often see in the middle and upper classes of society that self-forgetfulness, that noble expansive charity, that love end pity even to a stranger that is in sorrow, which we meet in real life—not in fiction only—amongst the poor?
        Briant came in the evening, and the poor woman who was a little relieved from severe suffering, listened with great attention to the voice of the young man as he read out of the Book of which she knew so little, words of warning, peace, and reconciliation.
        Briant's sister came too, She could not stay that night, she said, because she had a little sick sister at home, and this was her turn to nurse and tend her; but she would try and come in the morning that Mrs. Warnes might get a little rest. It would be Sunday, and she had no work to do then, and her mother had promised to spare her.
        Briant looked at Mrs. Warnes to see how she bore the prospect of a lost night's rest. There was a quiet smile upon her face, such as he had scarcely ever seen there before.
        "You were quite right, Briant, last evening," said she, comprehending the meaning of that soul-reading glance; "I have been all wrong for many years past, and have forgotten the Saviour's example. I have been content to live for myself, and thought that because I had neither money nor learning, I had no part in life at all, but just to go on alone to the grave."
        Night came on; the children were in her little upper chamber asleep; the lodgers were all asleep, and the patient slept too. The widow sate and watched. Though very tired in body, she was not weary in well-doing. In fact, it is a question whether any heart in that old city was more at rest at the dawn of that sabbath morning than hers. She was not hiding her talent now; and who could tell, she thought, but that her one talent, if properly traded with and used, would bring forth five talents more.
        True to her promise, Briant's sister came the next day, and Mrs. Warnes was able to take some rest. The children's faces having been made cleaner than usual, the father took the youngest to his sister's house in a neighbouring village, leaving Jenny to be of as much use as she could at home.
        Poor Mrs. Warnes! "If it were not Sunday morning, and if I were not so tired, I could not sleep in this littered, dirty room," said she, when she entered the apartment the little Parnells had just vacated; but it was Sunday, so she smoothed the bed, and reserving a lecture for Jenny on her untidiness till she had rested, she lay down to rest.
        "Ah!" thought she, before she dropped off to sleep, "I should not wonder if that verse of Dr. Watts' holds good for the mind as well as the body—that

                "Satan finds some mischief still
                For idle hands to do."

I have been useless and idle too, and he has harassed me with doubts and fears all my Christian life long. Useless Christians can't be happy, as Briant has often said. I have sate idle in a corner long enough to be miserable; I must now see if there is not something for me to do in the world, out of gratitude to Him who has paid the mighty debt that I owed to God."
        Whilst thinking on these things she fell asleep.