viz., the filling of the grate with wood and coals, not for kindling at
this moment, but so as to have it ready for kindling on the next day. The
appearances all showed that she must have been engaged in this labor at
the very moment when the murderer entered; and perhaps the succession of
the incidents arranged itself as follows:--From the awful ejaculation and
loud outcry to Christ, as overheard by the journeyman, it was clear that
then first she had been alarmed; yet this was at least one and a-half or
even two minutes after the door-slamming. Consequently the alarm which had
so fearfully and seasonably alarmed the young man, must, in some
unaccountable way, have been misinterpreted by the two women. It was said,
at the time, that Mrs. Williamson labored under some dulness of hearing;
and it was conjectured that the servant, having her ears filled with the
noise of her own scrubbing, and her head half under the grate, might have
confounded it with the street noises, or else might have imputed this
violent closure to some mischievous boys. But, howsoever explained, the
fact was evident, that, until the words of appeal to Christ, the servant
had noticed nothing suspicious, nothing which interrupted her labors. If
so, it followed that neither had Mrs. Williamson noticed anything; for, in
that case, she would have communicated her own alarm to the servant, since
both were in the same small room. Apparently the course of things after
the murderer had entered the room was this:--Mrs. Williamson had probably
not seen him, from the accident of standing with her back to the door.
Her, therefore, before he was himself observed at all, he had stunned and
prostrated by a shattering blow on the back of her head; this blow,
inflicted by a crow-bar, had smashed in the hinder part of the skull. She
fell; and by the noise of her fall (for all was the work of a moment) had
first roused the attention of the servant; who then uttered the cry which
had reached the young man; but before she could repeat it, the murderer
had descended with his uplifted instrument upon _her_ head, crushing
the skull inwards upon the brain. Both the women were irrecoverably