The well-accepted fact of the sudden changing of the color of the hair from violent emotions or other causes has always excited great interest, and many ingenious explanations have been devised to account for it. There is a record in the time of Charles V of a young man who was committed to prison in 1546 for seducing his girl companion, and while there was in great fear and grief, expecting a death-sentence from the Emperor the next day. When brought before his judge, his face was wan and pale and his hair and beard gray, the change having taken place in the night. His beard was filthy with drivel, and the Emperor, moved by his pitiful condition, pardoned him. There was a clergyman of Nottingham whose daughter at the age of thirteen experienced a change from jet-blackness of the hair to white in a single night, but this was confined to a spot on the back of the head 1 1/2 inches in length. Her hair soon became striped, and in seven years was totally white. The same article speaks of a girl in Bedfordshire, Maria Seeley, aged eight, whose face was swarthy, and whose hair was long and dark on one side and light and short on the other. One side of her body was also brown, while the other side was light and fair. She was seen by the faculty in London, but no cause could be established. Voigtel mentions the occurrence of canities almost suddenly. Bichat had a personal acquaintance whose hair became almost entirely gray in consequence of some distressing news that reached him. Cassan records a similar case. According to Rayer, a woman by the name of Perat, summoned before the Chamber of Peers to give evidence in the trial of the assassin Louvel, was so much affected that her hair became entirely white in a single night Byron makes mention of this peculiar anomaly in the opening stanzas of the "Prisoner of Chillon:"-- "My hair is gray, but not with years, Nor grew it white In a single night. As men's have grown from sudden fears."