o a vicious thrust--so declares the chap-book--from "the painted
Jezebel within," he fell, while the horses plunging forward caused the
near hind wheel of the heavy, lumbering vehicle to pass over his legs,
almost severing them from his body just above the knee.

Thereupon--and here the homely language of the gutter poet rose to a
level of rude eloquence--the outraged mother, holding the mangled and
dying child in her arms, cursed the man who had brought this ruin upon
her. Cursed him and his descendants, to the sixth and seventh
generations, good and bad alike. Declaring, moreover, that as judgment
on his perfidy and lust, no owner of Brockhurst should reach the life
limit set by the Psalmist, and die quiet and Christianly in his bed,
until a somewhat portentous event should have taken place--namely,
until, as the jingling rhyme set forth:--

"--a fatherless babe to the birth shall have come,
Of brother or sister shall he have none,
But red-gold hair and eyes of blue
And a foot that will never know stocking or shoe.
If he opens his purse to the lamenter's cry,
Then the woe shall lift and be laid for aye."

Julius March, his spare, black figure crouched together, sat on the top
step of the library ladder musing. His first movement had been one of
refined and contemptuous disgust. Sensuality and the tragedies
engendered by it were so wholly foreign to his nature and mental
outlook, that it was difficult to him to reckon with them seriously and
admit the very actual and permanent part which they play and always
have played in the great drama of human life. It distressed, it, in a
sense, annoyed him that the legend of Brockhurst, which had caused him
elaborate imaginative terrors during his childhood, should belong to
this gross and vulgar order of history. Yet indubitably--as he
reluctantly admitted--each owner of Brockhurst had very certainly found
death in the midst of life, and that according to some rather brutal
and bloody pattern. This might, of course, be judged the result of
merest coincidence. Had he leisure and opportunity to search them out,
he could find, no doubt, plausible explanation of the majority of
cases. Only that fact of persistent violence, persistent accident, did
remain. It stared him in the face, so to speak, defiant of denial. And
the deduction, consequent upon it, stared him in the face likewise. He
was constrained to confess that the first clause of the deeply wronged