Page:Blanchard on L. E. L.pdf/191

Rh throw it away—he reconciles the two facts by the simple declaration, that he did not know Hydrocyanic and Prussic acid to be the same. (The writer can add for himself, that at the time referred to, he was equally ignorant on this point.) So may it have been with numbers; and so with her, who, using some remedy for spasms, may have little suspected that the bottle containing it had once held a poison which, under its common name, she knew to be of the very deadliest character. In a majority of instances taken from ordinary life, the word "Hydrocyanic," would probably produce very little of that instinctive caution and alarm which the familiar term "Prussic acid," would be certain to excite.

Instances of sudden death from natural causes occur too frequently, and are always too shocking to the feelings of survivors, to warrant us in attaching to incidents seemingly connected with the cause of death yet mysterious in themselves, more consequence than fairly belongs to them. Whatever may have been the nature of the sudden illness, the deadly fit with which she is presumed to have been seized (respecting which there can now be no evidence), it may have been instantaneous and terrible enough to have prevented her from giving an alarm, from calling for water to mix with the medicine, from using it if it were at hand. Yet the natural impulse of hastening to seek assistance, seems evidently to have operated in carrying her across the room to the door; there the medicine may have escaped from the bottle as she fell—fell, too, as was denoted by some bruises on her cheek and hands, with a greater degree of violence perhaps than consists with the instant relaxation which is the declared and unquestioned consequence of a powerful dose of Prussic acid.