set, by a maid servant,
in order to terrify it into silence. The thoughtless creature first
menaced it with sending it to '_the bad place_,' as the phrase is there;
and, at last, to reduce it to silence, put it into the closet, shut the
door, and went out of the room. She went back, in a few minutes, and
found the child in _a fit_. It recovered from that, but was for life an
ideot. When the parents, who had been out two days and two nights on a
visit of pleasure, came home, they were told that the child had had _a
fit_; but, they were not told the cause. The girl, however, who was a
neighbour's daughter, being on her death-bed about ten years afterwards,
could not die in peace without sending for the mother of the child (now
become a young man) and asking forgiveness of her. The mother herself
was, however, the greatest offender of the two: a whole lifetime of
sorrow and of mortification was a punishment too light for her and her
husband. Thousands upon thousands of human beings have been deprived of
their senses by these and similar means.

269. It is not long since that we read, in the newspapers, of a child
being absolutely _killed_, at Birmingham, I think it was, by being thus
frightened. The parents had gone out into what is called an evening
party. The servants, naturally enough, had their party at home; and the
mistress, who, by some unexpected accident, had been brought home at an
early hour, finding the parlour full of company, ran up stairs to see
about her child, about two or three years old. She found it with its
eyes open, but _fixed_; touching it, she found it inanimate. The doctor
was sent for in vain: it was quite dead. The maid affected to know
nothing of the cause; but some one of the parties assembled discovered,
pinned up to the curtains of the bed, _a horrid figure_, made up partly
of a frightful mask! This, as the wretched girl confessed, had been done
to keep the child _quiet_, while she was with her company below. When
one reflects on the anguish that the poor little thing must have
endured, before the life was quite frightened out of it, one can find no
terms sufficiently strong to express the abhorrence due to the
perpetrator of this crime, which was, in fact, a cruel murder; and, if
it was beyond the reach of the law, it was so and is so, because, as in
the cases of parricide, the law, in making no provision for punishment
peculiarly severe, has, out of respect to human nature, supposed such
c