ed him the foul fiend in his ain shape, sitting on the laird's
coffin! Ower he couped, as if he had been dead. He could not tell how
long he lay in a trance at the door; but when he gathered himself, he
cried on his neighbour, and getting nae answer, raised the house, when
Dougal was found lying dead within twa steps of the bed where his
master's coffin was placed. As for the whistle, it was lost ance and
aye, but mony a time it was heard at the top of the house on the
bartizan and among the auld chimneys and turrets, where the howlets have
their nests." The coffin of the dead laird lies in state on a table
covered with black cloth, richly ornamented with his armorial bearings;
at the foot of the bier stands his black plumed helmet; while atop of
the coffin crouches the grinning ape with the laird's whistle in his
paw; on the ground, as they have been tossed about by the mischievous
beast, lie his rapier, gauntlet, and other military trappings. The
furniture, the fittings, the sombre hangings, the gloomy ancestral
portraits, all are in keeping with the weird scene and its surroundings.
_The Death of Sikes_, and _Fagin in the Condemned Cell_ (especially the
latter) have been described any number of times, and the circumstances,
moreover, under which the latter design was conceived, told invariably
wrong. In the _Murder of Sir Rowland Trenchard_ ["Jack Sheppard"], we
have a Rembrandtish etching, quite equalling in power and intensity that
of _Fagin in the Condemned Cell_. The gloomy depths of the well hole are
illumined only by the pine torch of the frightened Jew, as Wild hammers
with his bludgeon on the fingers of the doomed wretch who, maimed and
faint from loss of blood, clings with desperate tenacity to the
bannister, from which his relaxing grip will presently plunge him into
the black abyss below.

The "Tower of London" introduces us to two scenes of a dismal and
terrible character in the etching entitled _Xit Wedded to the
Scavenger's Daughter_, the artist carries us to a gloomy torture
chamber, dimly lighted by a solitary lantern. On the framework of the
rack sits the dwarf Xit, his limbs compressed in the grip of the
frightful instrument called the "Scavenger's daughter," while Simon
Renard, scarcely able to repress a smile, interrogates the comical
little figure at his leisure. Behind him stands Sorrocold, the surgeon;
and in the farther corner Mauger (the headsman), Nightgall, and an
assistant torturer, reclin