"Now, the precious leg while cash was flush,
Or the Count's acceptance worth a rush,
Had never excited dissension;
But no sooner the stocks began to fall,
Than, without any ossification at all,
The limb became what people call
A perfect bone of contention.
"For altered days made altered ways,
And instead of the complimentary phrase
So current before her bridal,
The Countess heard, in language low,
That her precious leg was precious slow,
A good 'un to look at, but bad to go,
And kept quite a sum lying idle.
* * * * *
"But spite of hint, and threat, and scoff,
The leg kept its situation;
For legs are not to be taken off
By a verbal amputation.
"Firmly then—and more firmly yet—
With scorn for scorn, and with threat for threat,
The proud one confronted the cruel;
And loud and bitter the quarrel arose,
Fierce and merciless—one of those
With spoken daggers, and looks like blows—
In all but the bloodshed a duel.
"Rash and wild, and wretched and wrong,
Were the words that came from weak and strong,
Till, maddened for desperate matters,
Fierce as a tigress escaped from her den,
She flew to her desk—'twas opened—and then,
In the time it takes to try a pen,
Or the clerk to utter his slow 'Amen,'
Her will was in fifty tatters!
"But the Count, instead of curses wild,
Only nodded his head and smiled,
As if at the spleen of an angry child;
But the calm was deceitful and sinister!
And a lull like the lull of the treacherous sea—
For Hate in that moment had sworn to be
The golden leg's sole legatee,
And that very night to administer."
"The torn Will."
"That very night!"—one more night of golden dreaming, in the midst of which comes death; the deliverer from an existence which the worship of gold has made so pitiful: