At that instant they heard a distant rumor. People moved by curiosity are running through the street, and confused exclamations of astonishment and pity reach their ears.
"What is it?" asked Rita, approaching the window.
"They are bringing the dead man this way," was the answer.
Elvira felt herself irresistibly impelled to look out.
"Come away, Elvira," said her mother, "you know that you cannot bear the sight of a corpse."
Elvira did not hear her, for the crowd, that drawn by curiosity, sympathy, or friendship, had surrounded the body and its attendants, was coming near. Anna and Maria, also placed themselves at the grating. The corpse approached, lying across a horse and covered with a sheet. An old man follows it, supported by two persons. His head is bowed upon his breast. They look at him--merciful God! it is Pedro! and they utter a simultaneous cry.
Pedro hears it, lifts his head and sees Rita. Despair and indignation give him strength. He frees himself violently from the arms that sustain him, and precipitates himself toward the horse, exclaiming: "Look at your work, heartless woman! Perico killed him." Saying this, he lifts the sheet and exposes the body of Ventura, pale, bloody, and with a deep wound in the breast.
From the Dublin University Magazine.
IRISH FOLK BOOKS OF THE LAST CENTURY.
In the eighteenth century Ireland did not possess the boon of Commissioners to prepare useful and interesting school books. However, as the mass of the peasantry wished to give their children the only education they could command, namely, that afforded by the hedge schools, and as young and old liked reading stories and popular histories, or at least hearing them read, some Dublin, Cork, and Limerick printers assumed the duties neglected by senators, and published "Primers," "Reading-made-easie's," "Child's-new-play-thing," and the widely diffused "Universal Spelling Book" of the magisterial Daniel Fenning, for mere educational purposes. These were "adorned with cuts," but the transition from stage to stage was too abrupt, and the concluding portions of the early books were as difficult as that of the "Universal Spelling Book" itself, which the author, in order to render it less practically useful, had encumbered with a dry and difficult grammar placed in the centre of the volume.