It is a remark founded upon the nature of man, and universally credited by the thinking part of the world, that to suffer is an attribute of mortality.
Impressed with a due conviction of this important precept, our heroine but smiled as she heard Stiletto lock her door. It was now midnight, and she took up her lamp to examine the chamber. Rusty daggers, mouldering bones, and ragged palls, lay scattered in all the profusion of feudal plenty.
Several horrors now made their appearance; but the most uncommon was a winged eyeball that fluttered before her face.
Say, little, foolish, fluttering thing?
She began shrieking and adjusting her hair at a mirror, when lo! she beheld the reflection of a ghastly visage peeping over her shoulder! Much disconcerted, the trembling girl approached the bed. An impertinent apparition, with a peculiar nose, stood there, and made faces at her. She felt offended at the freedom, to say nothing of her being half dead with fright.
'Is it not enough,' thought she, 'to be harassed by beings of this world, but those of the next too must think proper to interfere? I am sure,' said she, as she raised her voice in a taunting manner, 'En verité, I have no desire to meddle with their affairs. Sur ma vie, I have no taste for brim-stone. So let me just advise a certain inhabitant of a certain world (not the best, I believe,) to think less of my concerns, and more of his own.'
Having thus asserted her dignity, without being too personal, she walked to the casement in tears, and sang these simple lines, which she graced with intermittent sobs.
SONG
Alas, well-a-day, woe to me,
Singing willow, willow, willow;