and establishment in the country, to purify me
after the atmosphere of the Professor's drugs. I would--well! well! never
mind what else I would have.

"Talking of power, have you read the account of the execution last year
of that wonderful criminal, Anna Maria Zwanziger? Wherever she went, the
path of this terrific woman is strewed with the dead whom she has
poisoned. She appears to have lived to destroy her fellow-creatures, and
to have met her doom with the most undaunted courage. What a career! and
what an end! (1)

"The foolish people in Wurzburg are at a loss to find motives for some of
the murders she committed, and try to get out of the difficulty by
declaring that she must have been a homicidal maniac. That is not _my_
explanation. I can understand the murderess becoming morally intoxicated
with the sense of her own tremendous power. A mere human creature--only a
woman, Julie!--armed with the means of secretly dealing death with her,
wherever she goes--meeting with strangers who displease her, looking at
them quietly, and saying to herself, "I doom you to die, before you are a
day older"--is there no explanation, here, of some of Zwanziger's
poisonings which are incomprehensible to commonplace minds?

"I put this view, in talking of the trial, to the military commandant a
few days since. His vulgar wife answered me before he could speak.
'Madame Fontaine,' said this spitfire, 'my husband and I don't feel
_your_ sympathy with poisoners!' Take that as a specimen of the ladies of
Wurzburg--and let me close this unmercifully long letter. I think you
will acknowledge, my dear, that, when I do write, I place a flattering
trust in my friend's patient remembrance of me."

There the newspaper extracts came to an end.

As a picture of a perverted mind, struggling between good and evil, and
slowly losing ground under the stealthy influence of temptation, the
letters certainly possessed a melancholy interest for any thoughtful
reader. But (not being a spiteful woman) I failed to see, in these
extracts, the connection which Frau Meyer had attempted to establish
between the wickedness of Madame Fontaine and the disappearance of her
husband's medicine chest.

At the same time, I must acknowledge that a vague impression of distrust
_was_ left on my mind by what I had read. I felt a certain sense of
embarrassment at the prospect of renewing my relations with the widow, on
my return to Frankfort; and I was also conscious o