Scotland/Scots > Wilson's tales of the Borders and of Scotland > Volume 3

26 TALES OF THE BORDERS.
drawer which refused to come out to the full extent. Some¬
thing seemed to be jammed between it and the back of the
escritoire. Man is an enterprising animal; a little re¬
sistance sets his energies a-spring. I would not be baulked.
I would know what the impediment was and work out the
solution of the difficulty. By pulling hard the obstacle
gave way. The drawer followed my hand, while my body
fell back on the floor. Psha! some stray leaves of an old
pamphlet fluttered about. I had dismembered the ob¬
stacle, and would now collect the fragments. I had got
for my pains an old brochure, embellished by dreadful
woodcuts, of the old Newgate calender style, and en¬
titled, “ The true and genuine history of the murderer,
Jane Grierson, who poisoned her mistress, and thereby
became the wife of her master, Josiah Temple; ” the date
1742. I was no fancier of awful histories of murderers,
yet I would read myself asleep amidst horrors rather than
lie with my imagination in wakeful subjugation to the
images of these eternal Bernards. Bernard still! on the
top of the title page was written “ Amelia Bernard.” The
charm was here too. Which of these fair creatures on
the wall was the proprietor of this brochure? She had
read it surely with care. She must have cherished it, or
why identify it as her own ? Perhaps she was a lover of old
books; it could not be that she was a lover of cruel stories.
Those eyes were made for throwing forth the lambent
light of affection and love; how unlike to the staring
blood-shot orbs of that Jane Grierson on that terrific wood-
cut ! Yet, true to the nature of my species, at least my
sex, I found in the grim pamphlet that inexpressible some¬
thing which recommends coarse recitals of human depravity
even to cultivated minds, and which consists probably in
the conformity between the thing itself and the description
of it; the rugged words, semblances of the rugged imple¬
ments, and the savage actions of cruelty, address themselves