Page:Essays in miniature.djvu/77

 Rh hour which witnessed the crime saw his pinioned corpse dangling from the nearest tree, with the bloody knife hung in awful mockery around its neck. Thus the murder and its punishment conspired to make the lonely road a haunted path, ghost-ridden, terrible; where women shivered and hurried on, and little boys, creepy with fear, scampered by, breathless, in the dusk; seeing before them always, on the ragged turf, two small, piteous, blood-smeared bodies, and hearing ever, overhead, the rattle of the rusty knife against the felon's bones. The highway, with its unholy associations discreetly perpetuated in its name, became an education to the good people of Edinburgh, and taught them the value of emotions. They must have indistinctly felt what Mr. Louis Stevenson has so well described, the subtle harmony that unites an evil deed to its location. "Some places," he says, "speak distinctly. Certain dark gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck. Other spots, again, seem to abide their destiny,