_D'Am._ O my echo! I could stand Reverberating this sweet musical air Of joy till I had perished my sound lungs With violent laughter. Lonely night-raven, Thou hast seized a carcase. _Bor._ Put him out on's pain. I lay so fitly underneath the bank, From whence he fell, that ere his faltering tongue Could utter double O, I knocked out's brains With this fair ruby, and had another stone, Just of this form and bigness, ready; that I laid i' the broken skull upon the ground For's pillow, against the which they thought he fell And perished. _D'Am._ Upon this ground I'll build my manor house; And this shall be the chiefest corner stone. _Bor._ 'T has crowned the most judicious murder that The brain of man was e'er delivered of. _D'Am._ Ay, mark the plot. Not any circumstance That stood within the reach of the design Of persons, dispositions, matter, time, or place But by this brain of mine was made An instrumental help; yet nothing from The induction to the accomplishment seemed forced, Or done o' purpose, but by accident. _Bor._ First, my report that Charlemont was dead, Though false, yet covered with a mask of truth. _D'Am._ Ay, and delivered in as fit a time When all our minds so wholly were possessed With one affair, that no man would suspect A thought employed for any second end. _Bor._ Then the precisian[150] to be ready, when Your brother spake of death, to move his will. _D'Am._ His business called him thither, and it fell Within his office unrequested to't. From him it came religiously, and saved Our project from suspicion which if I Had moved, had been endangered. _Bor._ Then your healths, Though seeming but the ordinary rites And ceremonies due to festivals-- _D'Am._ Yet used by me to make the servants drunk, An instrument the plot could not have missed. 'Twas easy to set drunkards by the ears, They'd nothing but their torches to fight with, And when those lights were out-- _Bor._ Then darkness did Protect the execution of the work Both from prevention and discovery. _D'Am._ Here was a murder bravely carried through The eye of observation, unobserved. _Bor._ And those that saw the passage of it made The instruments, yet knew not what they did. _D'Am._ That power of rule philosophers ascribe To him they call the Supreme of the stars Making their influences governors Of sublunary creatures, when themselves Are senseless of their operations. What! [_Thunder and lightning._ Dost start at thunder? Credit my belief 'Tis a mere effect of Nature--an exhalation hot And dry involved within a watery vapour I' the middle region of the air; whose coldness, Congealing that thick moisture to a cloud, The angry exhalation, shut within A prison of contrary quality, Strives to be free and with the violent Eruption through the grossness of that cloud, Makes this noise we hear.