Erie, paddle hard
back, stem the torrent, cling to the shore, hold on tight by this
friendly bough; know you not whither the headlong current drives? hear
you not the roar of many waters, the maddening rush as of an ocean
disenthralled? feel you not the earth trembling at the thunder--see you
not the heaven clouded o'er with spray? Helpless wretch--thy frail canoe
has leapt that dizzy water-cliff, Niagara!

But if, in doing that fell deed, madness raged upon the minutes, now
that it was done--all still, all calm, all quiet, Terror held the
hour-glass of Time. There lay the corpse, motionless, though coiled and
cramped in the attitude of struggling agony; and the murderer gazed upon
his victim with a horror most intense. Fly! fly!--he dared not stop to
think: fly! fly! any whither--as you are--wait for nothing; fly! thou
caitiff, for thy life! So he caught up the blood-bought spoils, and was
fumbling with shaky fingers at the handle of the garden-door, when the
unseen tempter whispered in his ear,

"I say, Simon, did not your aunt die of apoplexy?"

O, kind and wise suggestion! O, lightsome, tranquillizing thought!
Thanks! thanks! thanks!--And if the arch fiend had revealed himself in
person at the moment, Simon would have worshipped at his feet.

"But," and as he communed with his own black heart, there needed now no
devil for his prompter--"if this matter is to be believed, I must
contrive a little that it may look likelier. Let me see:--yes, we must
lay all tidy, and the old witch shall have died in her sleep; apoplexy!
capital indeed; no tell-tales either. Well, I must set to work."

Can mortal mind conceive that sickening office?--To face the strangled
corpse, yet warm; to lift the fearful burden in his arms, and order out
the heavily-yielding limbs in the ease of an innocent sleep? To arrange
the bed, smooth down the tumbled coverlid, set every thing straight
about the room, and erase all tokens of that dread encounter? It needed
nerves of iron, a heart all stone, a cool, clear head, a strong arm, a
mindful, self-protecting spirit; but all these requisites came to
Simon's aid upon the instant; frozen up with fear, his heart-strings
worked that puppet-man rigidly as wires; guilt supplied a reckless
energy, a wild physical power, which actuates no human frame but one
saturate with crime, or madness; and in the midst of those terrific
details, the murderer's judgment was so calm and so collected, that
nothing was