disclosed two sheets steeped in blood. Just at that moment the candle
went out, and the brother-in-law, looking through a chink in the door,
saw the two dark men stealing up-stairs; one armed with a dagger that
long (about five feet); the other carrying a chopper, a sack, and a
spade. Having no remembrance of the close of this adventure, I suppose
my faculties to have been always so frozen with terror at this stage of
it, that the power of listening stagnated within me for some quarter of
an hour.

These barbarous stories carried me, sitting there on the Holly-Tree
hearth, to the Roadside Inn, renowned in my time in a sixpenny book with
a folding plate, representing in a central compartment of oval form the
portrait of Jonathan Bradford, and in four corner compartments four
incidents of the tragedy with which the name is associated,--coloured
with a hand at once so free and economical, that the bloom of Jonathan's
complexion passed without any pause into the breeches of the ostler, and,
smearing itself off into the next division, became rum in a bottle. Then
I remembered how the landlord was found at the murdered traveller's
bedside, with his own knife at his feet, and blood upon his hand; how he
was hanged for the murder, notwithstanding his protestation that he had
indeed come there to kill the traveller for his saddle-bags, but had been
stricken motionless on finding him already slain; and how the ostler,
years afterwards, owned the deed. By this time I had made myself quite
uncomfortable. I stirred the fire, and stood with my back to it as long
as I could bear the heat, looking up at the darkness beyond the screen,
and at the wormy curtains creeping in and creeping out, like the worms in
the ballad of Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene.

There was an Inn in the cathedral town where I went to school, which had
pleasanter recollections about it than any of these. I took it next. It