In our enlightened days, and in the present improved state of education, it
may appear incredible that any nursery-maid could be so wicked as to
relate, or any child of six years old so foolish as to credit, such tales;
but I am speaking of what happened many years ago: nursery-maids and
children, I believe, are very different now from what they were then; and
in further proof of the progress of human knowledge and reason, we may
recollect that many of these very stories of the Jews, which we now hold
too preposterous for the infant and the nursery-maid to credit, were some
centuries ago universally believed by the English nation, and had furnished
more than one of our kings with pretexts for extortion and massacres.

But to proceed with my story. The impression made on my imagination by
these horrible tales was greater than my nursery-maid intended. Charmed by
the effect she had produced, she was next afraid that I should bring her
into disgrace with my mother, and she extorted from me a solemn promise
that I would never tell any body the secret she had communicated. From that
moment I became her slave, and her victim. I shudder when I look back to
all I suffered during the eighteen months I was under her tyranny. Every
night, the moment she and the candle left the room, I lay in an
indescribable agony of terror; my head under the bed-clothes, my knees
drawn up, in a cold perspiration. I saw faces around me grinning, glaring,
receding, advancing, all turning at last into the same face of the Jew with
the long beard and the terrible eyes; and that bag, in which I fancied were
mangled limbs of children--it opened to receive me, or fell upon my bed,
and lay heavy on my breast, so that I could neither stir nor scream; in
short, it was one continued nightmare; there was no refreshing sleep for me
till the hour when the candle returned and my tyrant--my protectress, as I
thought her--came to bed. In due course she suffered in her turn; for I
could not long endure this state, and, instead of submitting passively or