is Ghoul to present my
clearest relations and friends to my youthful mind under circumstances of
disparaging contrast. The brother-in-law was riding once through a
forest on a magnificent horse (we had no magnificent horse at our house),
attended by a favourite and valuable Newfoundland dog (we had no dog),
when he found himself benighted, and came to an Inn. A dark woman opened
the door, and he asked her if he could have a bed there. She answered
yes, and put his horse in the stable, and took him into a room where
there were two dark men. While he was at supper, a parrot in the room
began to talk, saying, "Blood, blood! Wipe up the blood!" Upon which
one of the dark men wrung the parrot's neck, and said he was fond of
roasted parrots, and he meant to have this one for breakfast in the
morning. After eating and drinking heartily, the immensely rich, tall
brother-in-law went up to bed; but he was rather vexed, because they had
shut his dog in the stable, saying that they never allowed dogs in the
house. He sat very quiet for more than an hour, thinking and thinking,
when, just as his candle was burning out, he heard a scratch at the door.
He opened the door, and there was the Newfoundland dog! The dog came
softly in, smelt about him, went straight to some straw in the corner
which the dark men had said covered apples, tore the straw away, and
disclosed two sheets steeped in blood. Just at that moment the candle
went out, and the brother-in-law, looking through a chink in the door,
saw the two dark men stealing up-stairs; one armed with a dagger that
long (about five feet); the other carrying a chopper, a sack, and a
spade. Having no remembrance of the close of this adventure, I suppose
my faculties to have been always so frozen with terror at this stage of
it, that the power of listening stagnated within me for some quarter of
an hour.

These barbarous stories carried me, sitting there on the Holly-Tree
hearth, to the Roadside Inn, renowned in my time in a sixpenny book with
a folding plate, representing in a central compartment of oval form the
portrait of Jonathan Bradford, and in four corner compartments four
incidents of the tragedy with which the name is associated,--coloured
with a hand at once so free and economical, that the bloom of Jonathan's
complexion passed without any pause into the breeches of the ostler, and,
smearing itself off into the next division, became rum in a bottle. Then
I remembered