Chapter II

“Oh!”
--_Milton._

“Ah!”
--_Pope._

One evening, the Baroness de Violenci, having sprained her left leg in the composition of an ecstatic ode, resolved not to go to Lady Penthesilea Rouge’s rout. While she was sitting alone at a plate of prawns, the footman entered with a basket, which had just been left for her. “Lay it down, John,” said she, touching his forehead with her fork. The gay-hearted young fellow did as he was desired and capered out of the room. Judge of her astonishment when she found, on opening it, a little cherub of a baby sleeping within. An oaken cross, with “Hysterica” inscribed in chalk, was appended at its neck, and a mark, like a bruised gooseberry, added interest to its elbow. As she and her lord had never had children, she determined, _sur le champ_, on adopting the pretty Hysterica. Fifteen years did this worthy woman dedicate to the progress of her little charge; and in that time taught her every mortal accomplishment. Her sigh, particularly, was esteemed the softest in Europe.

But the stroke of death is inevitable; come it must at last, and neither virtue nor wisdom can avoid it. In a word, the good old Baroness died, and our heroine fell senseless on her body.

“O what a fall was there, my countrymen!”

But it is now time to describe our heroine. As Milton tells us that Eve was “more lovely than Pandora” (an imaginary lady who never existed but in the brains of poets), so do we declare, and are ready to stake our lives, that our heroine excelled in her form the Timinitilidi, whom no man ever saw; and in her voice, the music of the spheres, which no man ever heard. Perhaps her face was not perfect; but it was more--it was interesting--it was oval. Her eyes were of the real, original old blue; and her lashes of the best silk. You forgot the thickness of her lips in the casket of pearls which they enshrined; and the roses of York and Lancaster were united in her cheek. A nose of the Grecian order surmounted the whole. Such was Hysterica.

But, alas! misfortunes are often gregarious, like sheep. For one night, when our heroine had repaired to the chapel, intending to drop her customary tear on the tomb of her sainted benefactress, she heard on a sudden,

“Oh, horrid horrible, and horridest horror!”

the distant organ peal a solemn voluntary. While she was preparing, in much terror and astonishment, to accompany it with her voice, four men in masks rushed from among some tombs and bore her to a carriage, which instantly drove off with the whole party. In vain she sought to soften them by swoons, tears, and a simple little ballad; they sat counting murders and not minding her. As the blinds of the carriage were closed the whole way, we waive a description of the country which they traversed. Besides, the prospect within the carriage will occupy the reader enough; for in one of the villains Hysterica discovered--Count Stilletto! She fainted. On the second day the carriage stopped at an old castle, and she was conveyed into a tapestried apartment--in which rusty daggers, mouldering bones, and ragged palls lay scattered in all the profusion of feudal plenty--where the delicate creature fell ill of an inverted eyelash, caused by continual weeping....