Читать книгу: «The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 13, No. 374, June 6, 1829», страница 5

LONG SNOW

In 1614, there was one of the heaviest and longest snows which has ever been remembered in the north of England. The Parochial Register, of Wotton Gilbert, states that it began on the 5th of January, and continued to snow more or less every day, (the heaviest fall being on the 22nd of February,) till the 12th of March,—to the great loss of cattle, and of human life as well.

A GOOD BISHOP

The great and good bishop Morton was preferred to the rectory of Long Marston, near York, four years before what is called the great plague began in that city, 1602. During this visitation, "he carried himself with so much heroical charity," says his biographer, "as will make the reader wonder to hear it." For the poorer sort being removed to the pest-house, he made it his frequent exercise to visit them with food, both for their bodies and souls. His chief errand was to instruct and comfort them, and pray for them and with them; and, to make his coming the more acceptable, he carried usually a sack of provision with him for those that wanted it. And because he would have no man to run any hazard thereby but himself, he seldom suffered any of his servants to come near him, but saddled and unsaddled his own horse, and had a private door made on purpose into his house and chamber. It was probably during this plague that the village of Simonside (in the chapelry of South Shields) was, according to tradition, so entirely depopulated, that the nearest townships divided the deserted lands. There is another tradition worthy of notice, that when the plague raged with great violence at Shields, the persons who were employed about the salt works entirely escaped the infection.

When the London mob was excited, by the movers of rebellion, against the bishop, this excellent prelate, on his way to the House of Lords, was almost torn to pieces. "Pull him out of his coach!" cried some; others, "nay he is a good man;" others, "but for all that he is a bishop!"—"I have often," says his biographer, heard him say, he believed he should not have escaped alive if a leading man among that rabble had not cried out, "Let him go and hang himself," which he was wont to compare to the words of the angel uttered by Balaam's ass. At that time he was seventy-six years of age, and, on that account, when the protesting prelates were, for this act of duty, committed to the Tower, he was remitted to the custody of the usher; and then, so little had he regarded the mammon of unrighteousness, that he had scarcely wherewith to defray the fees and charges of his confinement.

AMERICAN COMFORTS

Pittsburgh is full of coal and smoke; in New Orleans the people play cards on Sunday; living is dear at Washington city, and codfish cheap at Boston; and Irishmen are plenty in Pennsylvania, and pretty girls in Rhode Island.

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS

[We need not illustrate the force, or point the moral of the following sketch from the last number of Blackwood's Magazine. The parents of the writer were of "a serious cast," and attached to evangelical tenets, which he soon imbibed, together with an occasional tendency to gloom and nervous irritability.]

About the year 1790, at the Assizes for the county of which the town of C—r is the county town, was tried and convicted a wretch guilty of one of the most horrible murders upon record. He was a young man, probably (for he knew not his own years) of about twenty-two years of age. One of those wandering and unsettled creatures, who seem to be driven from place to place, they know not why. Without home; without name; without companion; without sympathy; without sense. Hearthless, friendless, idealess, almost soulless! and so ignorant, as not even to seem to know whether he had ever heard of a Redeemer, or seen his written word. It was on a stormy Christmas eve, when he begged shelter in the hut of an old man, whose office it was to regulate the transit of conveyances upon the road of a great mining establishment in the neighbourhood. The old man had received him, and shared with him his humble cheer and his humble bed; for on that night the wind blew and the sleet drove, after a manner that would have made it a crime to have turned a stranger dog to the door. The next day the poor old creature was found dead in his hut—his brains beaten out with an old iron implement which he used—and his little furniture rifled, and in confusion. The wretch had murdered him for the supposed hoard of a few shillings. The snow, from which he afforded his murderer shelter, had drifted in at the door, which the miscreant, when he fled, had left open, and was frozen red with the blood of his victim. But it betrayed a footstep hard frozen in the snow, and blood—and the nails of the murderer's shoe were counted, even as his days were soon to be. He was taken a few days after with a handkerchief of the old man upon his neck. So blind is blood-guiltiness.

Up to the hour of condemnation, he remained reckless as the wind—unrepenting as the flint—venomous as the blind-worm. With that deep and horrible cunning which is so often united to unprincipled ignorance, he had almost involved in his fate another vagrant with whom he had chanced to consort, and to whom he had disposed of some of the blood-bought spoils. The circumstantial evidence was so involved and interwoven, that the jury, after long and obvious hesitation as to the latter, found both guilty; and the terrible sentence of death, within forty-eight hours, was passed upon both. The culprit bore it without much outward emotion; but when taken from the dock, his companion, infuriated by despair and grief, found means to level a violent blow at the head of his miserable and selfish betrayer, which long deprived the wretch of sense and motion, and, for some time, was thought to have anticipated the executioner. Would it had done so! But let me do my duty as I ought—let me repress the horror which one scene of this dreadful drama never fails to throw over my spirit—that I may tell my story as a man—and my confession at least be clear. When the felon awoke out of the deathlike trance into which this assault had thrown him, his hardihood was gone; and he was reconveyed to the cell, in which he was destined agonizingly to struggle out his last hideous and distorted hours, in a state of abject horror which cannot be described. He who felt nothing—knew nothing—had now his eyes opened with terrible clearness to one object—the livid phantasma of a strangling death. All the rest was convulsive despair and darkness. Thought shudders at it—but let me go on,

[He visits the murderer in prison, accompanied by the clergyman.]

I undertook to pass with the murderer—his LAST NIGHT—such a last!– but let me compose myself.

It was about the hour of ten, on a gusty and somewhat raw evening of September, that I was locked up alone with the murderer. It was the evening of the Sabbath. Some rain had fallen, and the sun had not been long set without doors; but for the last hour and a half the dungeon had been dark, and illuminated only by a single taper. The clergyman of the prison, and some of my religious friends, had sat with us until the hour of locking-up, when, at the suggestion of the gaoler, they departed. I must confess their "good night," and the sound of the heavy door, which the gaoler locked after him, when he went to accompany them to the outer-gate of the gaol, sounded heavily on my heart. I felt a sudden shrink within me, as their steps quickly ceased to be heard upon the stone stairs—and when the distant prison door was finally closed, I watched the last echo. I had for a moment forgotten my companion.

When I turned round, he was sitting on the side of his low pallet, towards the head of it, supporting his head by his elbow against the wall, apparently in a state of half stupor. He was motionless, excepting a sort of convulsive movement, between sprawling and clutching of the fingers of the right hand, which was extended on his knee. His shrunk cheeks exhibited a deadly ashen paleness, with a slight tinge of yellow, the effect of confinement. His eyes were glossy and sunken, and seemed in part to have lost the power of gazing. They were turned with an unmeaning and vacant stare upon the window, where the last red streak of day was faintly visible, which they seemed vainly endeavouring to watch. The sense of my own situation now recoiled strongly upon me; and the sight of the wretch sitting stiffened in quiet agony, (for it was no better,) affected me with a faint sickness. I felt that an effort was necessary, and, with some difficulty, addressed a few cheering and consolatory phrases to the miserable creature I had undertaken to support. My words might not—but I fear my tone was too much in unison with his feelings, such as they were. His answer was a few inarticulate mutterings, between which, the spasmodic twitching of his fingers became more apparent than before. A noise at the door seemed decidedly to rouse him; and as he turned his head with a sudden effort, I felt relieved to see the gaoler enter. He was used to such scenes; and with an air of commiseration, but in a tone which lacked none of the firmness with which he habitually spoke, he asked the unhappy man some question of his welfare, and seemed satisfied with the head-shake and inarticulately muttered replies of the again drooping wretch, as if they were expected, and of course. Having directed the turnkey to place some wine and slight refreshments on the table, and to trim the light, he told me in a whisper, that my friends would be at the prison, with the clergyman, at the hour of six; and bidding the miserable convict and myself, after a cheering word or two, "good night," he departed—the door was closed—and the murderer and I were finally left together.

It was now past the hour of ten o'clock; and it became my solemn duty to take heed, that the last few hours of the dying sinner passed not, without such comfort to his struggling soul as human help might hold out. After reading to him some passages of the gospel, the most apposite to his trying state, and some desultory and unconnected conversation—for the poor creature, at times seemed to be unable, under his load of horror, to keep his ideas connected further than as they dwelt upon his own nearing and unavoidable execution—I prevailed upon him to join in prayer. He at this time appeared to be either so much exhausted, or labouring under so much lassitude from fear and want of rest, that I found it necessary to take his arm and turn him upon his knees by the pallet-side. The hour was an awful one. No sound was heard save an occasional ejaculation between a sigh and a smothered groan from the wretched felon. The candle burned dimly; and as I turned I saw, though I scarcely noticed it at the moment, a dim insect of the moth species, fluttering hurriedly round it, the sound of whose wings mournfully filled up the pauses of myself and my companion. When the nerves are strained to their uttermost, by such trifling circumstances are we affected. Here (thought I) there has been no light, at such an hour, for many years; and yet here is one whose office it seems to be to watch it! My spirit felt the necessity of some exertion; and with an energy, for which a few moments before I had hardly dared to hope, I poured out my soul in prayer. I besought mercy upon the blood-stained creature who was grovelling beside me—I asked that repentance and peace might be vouchsafed him—I begged, for our Redeemer's sake, that his last moments might know that untasted rapture of sin forgiven, and a cleansed soul, which faith alone can bring to fallen man—I conjured him to help and aid me to call upon the name of Christ; and I bade him put off life and forget it, and to trust in that name alone—I interceded that his latter agony might be soothed, and that the leave-taking of body and soul might be in quietness and peace. But he shook and shivered, and nature clung to the miserable straw of existence which yet floated upon the wide and dismal current of oblivion, and he groaned heavily and muttered, "No, no, no!" as if the very idea of death was unbearable, even for a moment; and "to die," even to him that must, were a thing impossible, and not to be thought of or named. And as I wrestled with the adversary that had dominion over him, he buried his shrunk and convulsed features in the covering of his miserable pallet; while his fingers twisted and writhed about, like so many scotched snakes, and his low, sick moans, made the very dungeon darker.

When I lifted him from his kneeling position, he obeyed my movement like a tired child, and again sat on the low pallet, in a state of motionless and unresisting torpor. The damp sweat stood on my own forehead, though not so cold as on his; and I poured myself out a small portion of wine, to ward off the exhaustion which I began to feel unusually strong upon me. I prevailed upon the poor wretch to swallow a little with me; and, as I broke a bit of bread, I thought, and spoke to him, of that last repast of Him who came to call sinners to repentance; and methought his eye grew lighter than it was. The sinking frame, exhausted and worn down by anxiety, confinement, and the poor allowance of a felon's gaol, drew a short respite from the cordial; and he listened to my words with something of self-collectedness—albeit slight tremblings might still be seen to run along his nerves at intervals; and his features collapsed, ever and anon, into that momentary vacuity of wildness which the touch of despair never fails to give. I endeavoured to improve the occasion. I exhorted him, for his soul's sake, and the relief of that which needed it too much, to make a full and unreserved confession, not only to God, who needed it not, but to man, who did. I besought him, for the good of all, and as he valued his soul's health, to detail the particulars of his crime, but his eye fell. That dark enemy, who takes care to leave in the heart just hope enough to keep despair alive, tongue-tied him; and he would not—even now—at the eleventh hour—give up the vain imagination, that the case of his companion might yet be confounded with his, to the escape of both—and vain it was. It had not been felt advisable, so far as to make him acquainted with the truth, that this had already been sifted and decided; and I judged this to be the time. Again and again I urged confession upon him. I put it to him that this act of justice might now be done for its own sake, and for that of the cleansing from spot of his stained spirit. I told him, finally, that it could no longer prejudice him in this world, where his fate was written and sealed, for that his companion was reprieved. I knew not what I did. Whether the tone of my voice, untutored in such business, had raised a momentary hope, I know not—but the revulsion was dreadful. He stared with a vacant look of sudden horror—a look which those who never saw cannot conceive, and which—(the remembrance is enough)—I hope never to see again—and twisting round, rolled upon his pallet with a stifled moan that seemed tearing him in pieces. As he lay, moaning and writhing backwards and forwards, the convulsions of his legs, the twisting of his fingers, and the shiverings that ran through his frame were terrible.