of
K. C. 1st, which I had heard so often. And then methought my dream
changed, and two Great Giants with heading-axes came striding over the
bed, so that I could feel their heavy feet on my breast; but their heads
were lost in the black sky of the bed's canopy. Horror! they stooped
down, and lo, they were headless, and from their sheared shoulders and
their great hatchets dripped, dripped, for ever dripped, great gouts of
something hot that came into my mouth and tasted salt! And I woke up
with my hair all in a dabble with the nightdews, with my Grandmother's
voice ringing in my ears, "Remember the Thirtieth of January!" Mercy on
me! I had that dream again last night; and the Giants with their axes
came striding over these old bones--then they changed to a headless
Spaniard and a bleeding Nun; but the voice that cried, "Remember!" spake
not in the English tongue, and was not my Grandmother's. And the hair of
my flesh stood up, as Job's did.

In the morning, when the clouds of night broke up from the pale winter's
sky, and went trooping away like so many funeral coach-horses to their
stable, they told me that my Grandmother was Dead; that she had passed
away when the first cock crew, softly sighing "Remember." It was a
dreadful thing for me that I could not, for many hours, weep; and that
for this lack of tears I was reproached for a hardened ingrate by those
who were now to be my most cruel governors. But I could not cry. The
grief within me baked my tears, and I could only stare all round at the
great desert of woe and solitude that seemed to have suddenly grown up
around me. That morning, for the first time, I was left to dress myself;
and when I crept down to the parlour, I found no breakfast laid out for
me--no silver tankard of new milk with a clove in it, no manchet of
sweet diet bread, no egg on a trencher in a little heap of salt. I asked
for my breakfast, and was told, for a young cub, that I might get it in
the kitchen. It would have gone hard with me if, in my Grandmother's
time, I had entered that place to her knowledge; but all things were
changed to me now, and when I entered the kitchen, the cook, nay, the
very scullion-wench, never moved for me. John Footman sat on the dresser
drinking a mug of purl that one of the maids had made for him. The cook
leered at me, while another saucy slut handed me a great lump of dry
bread, and a black-jack with some dregs of the smallest beer at the
bottom. What had I do