The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 326: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

296 THE COURT OF LONDON them deliberately or ponder upon their significance. They were impressions of a positive nature, — impressions of a hideous character, — and. from which she could not escape. Just Heavens! . were the graves of Newgate opening in the deep midnight, and sending up their dead to haunt, appal, and scare her? Were the tombs of murderers yawning in the midst of the prison pavement and yielding up their ghastly tenants to proclaim her doom? Were the ghosts of the hanged rising from their coffins, their winding-sheets, and their cerements, to hail her with the hideous welcome of the dead? O God! with reeling brain and bursting heart and quivering limbs did the wretched woman picture to herself this catalogue of horrors; and the paralysis, which had held her motionless hitherto, now so far relaxed its rigid influence as to enable her to writhe and twist with the spas- modic convulsions of a stricken snake as she sat in her dungeon cell. Then in the excruciation of her feelings in the rending violence of her agony, her teeth bit through her lips till the blood spurted forth, and her nails dug into the palms of her hands till they were clothed with gore. For the shapes that were stealing slowly, slowly through the darkness, and crept up as it were from a yawning gulf into her presence, — a gulf that was blacker than the black- ness of her own dungeon, — those dreadful shapes gradually appeared to become more distinct, as they ranged themselves in a line along the solid wall. Then she saw — or fancied she saw — that they had all halters around their necks; and she knew — or at least harboured the harrowing con- viction — that they were the dead whose worldly histories were black with crime and whose earthly names were asso- ciated with the gallows. Tall, stark, gaunt corpses were they, with their features all convulsed by the agonies of strangula- tion, their glazed eyes half-starting from their heads and fixed upon the wretched woman in ghastly recognition, their mouths partly open, and their long, lank, withered, naked arms extended toward the spot where the milliner was seated. And then the atmosphere seemed to grow damp and raw and clammy as if:infected with the breath of those spectral shapes. It was the mildewed atmosphere of the grave, the chill and musty exhalation of the tomb, the earthy and sickly vapour of the sepulchral vault. Yes, with extended arms and fingers pointing toward the CORNNIENIOOKS