The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 18: what you’re looking at

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

moe MYSTERIES OF THE COURT OF LONDON CHAPTER I THE COFFIN Ir was the morning of the funeral. The blinds were drawn down throughout the front of the mansion; but no mutes appeared at the door, the obsequies being merely re- spectable and not fashionable. From the period of being placed in her coffin, Ariadne had known but a few minutes of consciousness up to about ten o’clock on the morning of which we are now writing; and then she was awakened, as it were, from a profound sleep by hearing a strange noise. Gradually did conscious- ness resume its sway in her soul, — that consciousness which, every time it returned after an interval of stupor, was accom- panied by so many harrowing memories, so many poignant reminiscences. But on the present occasion Ariadne was longer than usual in collecting her ideas and marshalling her confused thoughts so as to arrive at the comprehension of the full horror of her position. Indeed, at first she could not possibly conjecture what that strange noise might be, a noise which nevertheless grated so ominously in her ears and jarred against every chord in her heart. It was a fearful noise, a sound well calculated to inspire dread horror even before its full meaning was comprehended. But when the damsel’s thoughts settled down into the proper cells of her mind, when her ideas became so disciplined as to take a consecutive order in her memory, then did the chain of 1 cCoOnniclooolks (C(O)