The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 19: what you’re looking at

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

2 THE COURT OF LONDON her recollections lead her on to the comprehension of this hideous noise that was grating and jarring close by her ears, and she felt, she knew, she understood that she was being screwed down in her coffin! Let it not be thought that during the many intervals of consciousness which Ariadne had experienced, from the first moment of her seeming death until the present time, let it not be thought, we say, that she had forgotten to appeal to that Almighty Being in whom she put her faith. Far from it: all her thoughts during those intervals were a homage to the Deity and were interwoven with a train of reflections constituting a worship. For she had faith, the sublimest faith in the goodness, the wisdom, and the power of the Almighty; and thus was it that occasionally, as we have before stated, she experienced a gleam of hope; thus was it also that she had been led to dream of heaven. It was not because she experienced bitter, burning moments of agony, excruciating intervals of horror, and fits of the blackest despair, it was not because she thus felt all the weaknesses of human nature generally and of her own sex in particular, that the reader must suppose she did not. pray or that she did not maintain her faith in Heaven. She had prayed, and she prayed now; in her soul did she pray deeply and fervently while the hideous noise of the coffin- screws grated upon her ears as they secured that ld which now seemed the barrier between herself and all earthly hope. Her mind still retained a vivid clearness. She could think calmly, collectedly upon the past, upon the awful present, and upon that future in which she put her faith. She hoped that her spirit would soon leave its mortal habita- tion and fly to those eternal realms whereof she had a glimpse in her dreams. But as yet, although the coffin-lid was. screwed down, she experienced no sense of suffocation, doubtless because the faculty of breathing was suspended. in that state of asphyxia wherein she was wrapped. But it was from the coming scenes of the tremendous drama. that her soul now recoiled so shudderingly, — the lowering into the grave, the shovelling in of the earth, and then the remaining in the clayey depth, perhaps to linger for days and days— _ Oh, this was the horror, the agony, the: anguish! But while these thoughts were fastening their gnawing, CORnnicloooks (E(@)