Hark! as his shriek reverberates alongTh' unpeopled passages, he fiercely cries,"The Plague!—The Plague!" and onward flies again.Truing upon its creaking hinge, a doorOpens with cautious hand-and from withinA few forms slowly glide—with pond'rous weightO'erburdened. The madman cast one glance,And bounding forward, quickly disappeared.Within the gloomy mansion's silent walls,The hand of heav'n on every soul was lald,Heavy and grievous—if the awful groans,Th' unhallowed curses, and the raving mind,The cries, the supplications, and the threats.That burst from ev'ry parched and fevered lip.Can tell of anguish whose acutest pangs,Imagination, in her wildest hour,Has disbelieving mocked at as unreal.On a low couch there lay a feeble man;Time had not played a loser's game with him,But at his touch, the tail and vig'rous formHad bowed and tottered; palsled were his limbs,And his white locks in wild confusion hungShading his brow, that throbbed as if to burst.The sightless balls in agony upturned,Livid and bloodshot, in their sockets rolled—His wasted fingers dug his aching flesh,That writhed a loathsome, and corrupted mass;His lips were covered with a whitish foam,And his uncensing cry was for a drop.A single drop, to cool his burning tongue.He called upon his child, a beauteous boy,That far off stood, his agony to see,And prayed a cup of water to assungeThe fire that ever on his vitals preyed.The trembling, weeping child dared not come nearBut shrieking hurried from the scene of death.Then rang a peal of laughter through the halls,The frantic maniac stood beside the bed,Intently watching each convulsive throe,Or starting quiver of the aged limbs,As one by one the Icy tides of death,Advancing sluggishly along each vein,Congealed the warmer and impetuous flowThat circled round the heart, and vainly stroveTo stem the frozen torrent; and his laughBurst wildly forth to mock the solemn scene.Too late to wound the spirit's parting sigh,For the last lingering breath had gently passedThe opened portals—and the roving eye,Rayless and glassy, stood forever fixed.The piercing cry, the shout of deep despair,Fell on a senseless and unconscious ear.He bent him o'er a form of beauteous mould,Whose horrid wailings rent the tainted air;Ile ghostly smiled upon the pallid faceOf her who plighted once her sacred faith,'Neath the o'erarching grove at the dead of night,To him her heart's belov'd-her bosom's lord.On him heav'n's vengeance fearfully she called—On his perfidious head—whose coward soulRecolled in terror from his stricken bride—Dared not her wants to tend, her head support,With her to die—or still with honour live.A voice was whispering in her sickened ear,"This is the end of love—and this rewardAll mortals bear—'tis thine to share it too."She heard, and looked upon the hideous face,That smiled in cool derision of her woe;She thought the fiends of hell were even nowProfanely paltering with her loosened soul;One shriek—one quivering groan-her spirit wingedY. P.Its unknown way to worlds beyond the tomb.
About a year after Hosea Parfett,—once a
flourishing farmer, and the last of a renowned
race of wrestlers and cudgel-players, had, on ac-
count of his confirmed lameness, produced by a
terrific in-lock from a Wiltshire giant, who had
dared the whole village to a bout, in which Ho-
sea, at the expense of a dislocated hip, threw him
three complete pancakes—but more especially
in consideration of his recent ruin by mildew,
fly, murrain, and other disasters, been elected
parish mole-catcher, Rachael, his seventh child,
was born. Her eyes, when she first opened them
to weep, were, as Brodie Bagster, the village
song-maker, says, like little violets, filled with
dew, peeping out of a spring snow. The same
worthy, in a doggerel composition, which fits in-
differently to the tune of Ally Croker, recording
the story of her early life, observes that her hair
was "silky soft and silvery bright" as the down
of a nestling dove; her first tooth, a pearl pluck-
ed by a mermaid from some coral nook, in which
its maker, the hermit-oyster—so he called the
fish—had hid it; and her check a mark which
the fairies had set up to pelt all day with rose-
buds. Brodie said half a hundred other flowery
things of Rachael, which it would have broken
his heart to know had been better said, before
he was born, of half a thousand others. Not-
withstanding the hyperbolic compliments of her
rustic laureate, which, unsupported, would per-
haps have rendered the fact doubtful,—Rachael,
from the testimony of all who saw her in the ear-
ly part of her babyhood, appears to have been
eminently beautiful. She was, it is said, a living
similitude of some fine old picture of a wingless
angel, in the antique library at Scroby Hall,
which her mother had had frequent occasion to
visit, while pregnant, for the purpose of receiving
from Sir Ralph, who was churchwarden, the pit-
tance per dozen allowed by the parish for the
moles caught by Hosea, whose pride would not
permit him to appear in person as a claimant of
the parochial fees to which his industry, absurd-
ly misdirected as it was, by custom and promise
entitled him.
Rachael was scarcely able to run alone when
some mysterious malady wrought an appalling
change in her appearance, and she became appaling
a nursling—hideous from her extreme haggard-
ness. It was said, and steadfastly believed in the
village, that Hosea Parfett's child had been sto-
len by the fairies, and that the creature which
nestled in its place was an accursed changeling.
Rachael's mother began to loathe the baby of
which she had before most passionately doted
and after pining for a few weeks, as Brodie Bag-