Page:Adventures of Rachel Cunningham.djvu/31

 A circumstance took place, however, which finally broke this charm: his glaring folly and shameless infidelity, at length threw his wife into a violent stale of frenzy, who, in a fit of temporary madness and ungovernable desperation, set fire to his premises, by which all his extensive stables were totally burned to the ground, and more than forty horses were consumed with them besides other valuable property. This produced the effect the wife desired; it brought the blacksmith back to his senses and to his home again.

We now have our heroine shwing [sic] off in the high figure of her intriguing celebrity at Harrisburgh, the capitol of Pensylvania, as une dame d'haut-gout,, a leading fashionable, and the polar magnet of lascivious attraction; where she vary soon entrapped, in her toils, and formed an amorous intimacy with Judge F– – – – – – –, a name prominently conspicuous and foremost in the list of debauchees in that said pious, and exemplary state. Notwithstanding the dignity of his rank, the gravity of his official character, and, above all, the ample experience he must have derived from his many engagements in prior amours and lustful connections with similar loose fish. Judge F– – – – – – – was as deeply smitten by her alluring graces, as much fascinated with her beauty, and not less the purblind dupe of her cunning practices, than any of her former lovers had proved themselves to be.

What her reason was for leaving the judge is not certain; but is has generally been said to be, that the judge was to far gone for her, too much worn out in the service of Venus by his former debaucheries, to afford our heroine that satisfaction her warmth of constitution naturally required.

The next principal and most horrible scene, from the appalling atrocities of it, took place in Alleghany County, where this vile, this infamous woman gives full loose to her diabolical disposition; and the following circumstances of deep and damning criminality, involving the perpetration of the blackest deeds of guilt, will afford the fullest demonstration, in development of her character, that never did monster in the shape of woman, and bearing angel show of form without, have more the spirit of the foulest fury within that hell's worst malice could engender: