Fear has been known to turn the hair in a single night from black to grey or white. This happened, amongst others, to Ludovico Sforza. The same is asserted of Queen Marie Antoinette, although not so suddenly, and, as some say, from grief, not fear. The Emperor Louis, of Bavaria, anno 1256, suspected his wife, Mary of Brabant, without just cause, condemned her, unheard, for adultery, and caused her chief lady-in-waiting, who was also {164} innocent, to be cast headlong from a tower, as a confederate in his dishonor. Soon after this horrible cruelty he was visited by a fearful vision one night, and rose in the morning with his dark locks as white as snow. A young Spaniard of noble family, Don Diego Osorio, being in love with a lady of the court, prevailed on her to grant him an interview by night in the royal gardens. The barking of a little dog betrayed them. The gallant was seized by the guard and conveyed to prison. It was a capital crime to be found in that place without special permission, and therefore he was condemned to die. The reading of the sentence so unmanned him that the next morning he stood in presence of his jailer with a furrowed visage and grey hair. The fact being reported to King Ferdinand as a prodigy, he was moved to compassion, and pardoned the culprit, saying, he had been sufficiently punished in exchanging the bloom of youth for the hoary aspect of age. The same happened to the father of Martin Delrio, who, lying sick in bed, heard the physicians say he would certainly die. He recovered, but the fright gave him a grey head in a few hours, and this instance of the terror he had suffered never afterward left him. Robert Boyle, in his Philosophical Examples, relates the following incident of the same class: "Being about four or six years since," he says, "in the county of Cork, there was an Irish captain, a man of middle age and stature, who came with some of his followers to surrender himself to the Lord Broghill, who then commanded the English forces in those parts, upon a public offer of pardon to the Irish that would lay down their arms. He was casually met with in a suspicious place by a party of the English, and intercepted, the Lord Broghill being then absent. He was so apprehensive of being put to death before the return of the commander-in-chief, that his anxiety of mind quickly altered the color of his hair in a peculiar manner. It was not uniformly changed, but here and there certain peculiar tufts and locks, whose bases might be about an inch in diameter were suddenly turned white alone; the rest of his hair, whereof the Irish used to wear good store, retained its natural reddish color."