knife into the side of his female. The mother shrieked. The
father caught the son (who had wrested the knife from the paternal
grasp) up in his arms, carried him down-stairs, shoved him into a
copper of boiling water among some linen, closed the lid, and
jumped upon the top of it, in which position he was found with a
ferocious countenance by the mother, who arrived in the melancholy
wash-house just as he had so settled himself.

'"Where's my boy?" shrieked the mother.

'"In that copper, boiling," coolly replied the benign father.

'Struck by the awful intelligence, the mother rushed from the
house, and alarmed the neighbourhood. The police entered a minute
afterwards. The father, having bolted the wash-house door, had
bolted himself. They dragged the lifeless body of the boiled baker
from the cauldron, and, with a promptitude commendable in men of
their station, they immediately carried it to the station-house.
Subsequently, the baker was apprehended while seated on the top of
a lamp-post in Parliament Street, lighting his pipe.'

The whole horrible ideality of the Mysteries of Udolpho, condensed
into the pithy effect of a ten-line paragraph, could not possibly
have so affected the narrator's auditory. Silence, the purest and
most noble of all kinds of applause, bore ample testimony to the
barbarity of the baker, as well as to Bolton's knack of narration;
and it was only broken after some minutes had elapsed by
interjectional expressions of the intense indignation of every man
present. The baker wondered how a British baker could so disgrace
himself and the highly honourable calling to which he belonged; and