The horror of Emilia, on discovering that the Moor had murdered her mistress, was scarcely greater than that of Miss Morbid! She hardly, she said, believed her own senses. You might have knocked her down with a feather! She did not know whether she stood on her head or her heels. She was rooted to the spot; and her hair, if it had been her own, would have stood upright upon her head! There was no doubt in the case. She saw the transfer of a portion of her own bank stock, from her escritoire into the right-hand pocket of her protégé--she heard it chink as it dropped downwards--she was petrified!--dumbfounded!--thunderbolted!--“annilliated!” She was as white as a sheet, but she felt as if all the blacks in the world had just blown in her face. Her first impulse was to rush upon the robber, and insist on restitution--her second was to sit down and weep,--and her third was to talk. The opening as usual was a mere torrent of ejaculations intermixed with vituperation--but she gradually fell into a lecture with many heads. First, she described all that she had done for the Blacks, and then, alas! all that the Blacks had done for her. Next she insisted on the enormity of the crime, and, anon, she enlarged on the nature of its punishment. It was here that she was most eloquent. She traced the course of human justice, from detection to conviction, and thence to execution, liberally throwing dissection into the bargain: and then descending with Dante into the unmentionable regions, she painted its terrors and tortures with all the circumstantial fidelity that certain very Old Masters have displayed on the same subject. “And now, you black wretch,” she concluded, having just given the finishing touch to a portrait of Satan himself; “and now, you black wretch, I insist on knowing what I was robbed for. Come, tell me what tempted you! I’m determined to hear it! I insist, I say, on knowing what was to be done with the wages of iniquity!” She insisted, however, in vain. The black wretch had seriously inclined her ear to the whole lecture, grinning and blubbering by turns. The Judge with his black cap, the Counsel and their wigs, the twelve men in a box, and Jack Ketch himself--whom she associated with that pleasant West Indian personage, John Canoe--had amused, nay, tickled her fancy; the press-room, the irons, the rope, and the Ordinary, whom she mistook for an overseer, had raised her curiosity, and excited her fears; but the spiritualities, without any reference to Obeah, had simply mystified and disgusted her, and she was now in a fit of the sulks. Her mistress, however, persisted in her question; and not the less pertinaciously, perhaps, from expecting a new peg whereon to hang a fresh lecture. She was determined to learn the destination of the stolen money; and by dint of insisting, cajoling, and, above all, threatening--for instance, with the whole Posse Comitatis--she finally carried her point.