"Thy brother has at length paid the forfeit of his crimes. The wages
of sin is death! And his head is before thee. Heaven hath avenged the
innocent blood he hath shed. Last night, in the lusty vigour of a
drunken debauch, passing over London Bridge, he encounters another
brawl, wherein, having run at the watchmen with his rapier, one blow
of the bill which they carried severed thy brother's head from his
trunk. The latter was cast over the parapet into the river. The head
only remained, which an eye witness, if not a friend, hath sent to
thee!" His sister tried at first to keep the story of her brother's
death a secret, and hid with all speed this ghastly memorial for ever,
as she hoped, from the gaze and knowledge of the world. It was her
desire to conceal this foul stain upon the family name, but "the grave
gives back its dead. The charnel gapes. The ghastly head hath burst
its cold tabernacle, and risen from the dust." No human power could
drive it away. It hath "been torn in pieces, burnt, and otherwise
destroyed, but even on the subsequent day it is seen filling its
wonted place. Yet it was always observed that sore vengeance
lighted on its persecutors. One who hacked it in pieces was seized
with such horrible torments in his limbs that it seemed as though he
might be undergoing the same process. Sometimes, if only displaced, a
fearful storm would arise, so loud and terrible that the very elements
themselves seemed to become the ministers of its wrath." Nor will this
eccentric piece of mortality allow the little aperture in which it
rests to be walled up, for it remains there still, whitened and
bleached by the weather, "looking forth from those rayless sockets
upon the scenes which, when living, they had once beheld." Towards the
close of the last century, Thomas Barritt, the Manchester antiquary,
visited this skull--"this surprising piece of household furniture," as
he calls it, and adds that "one of us who was last in company with it,