Page:Story of Blue Beard, or, The effects of female curiosity.pdf/24

 The scene of these events still continues nearly as it was 300 years ago. The remains of the old cottage, with its blackened walls, (haunted of course by a thousand evil spirits,) and the extensive moor, on which a more modern inn (if it can be dignified with an epithet) resembles its predecessor in every thing but the character of its inhabitants; the landlord is deformed, but possesses extraordinary genius; he has himself manufactored a violin, on which he plays with untaught skill,---and if any discord be heard in the house, or any murder committed in it, this is his only instrument. His daughter has inherited her father’s talent, and learnt all his tales of terror and superstition, which she relates with infinite spirit; when she describes, with all the animation of an eye-witness, the struggle of the victims grasping the grass as a last hope of preservation, and trying to drag in their assassin as an expiring effort of vengeance,---when you are told that for three hundred years the clear waters in this diamond of the desert have remained untasted by mortal lips, and that the solitary traveller is still pursued at night by the howling of the blood hound, ---it is then only that it is possible fully to appreciate the terrors of.