She was a kind of
relation of my own, and met her death in a manner so shocking--
being killed, in a fit of insanity, by a female attendant who had
been attached to her person for half a lifetime--that I cannot
now recall her memory, child as I was when the catastrophe
occurred, without a painful reawakening of perhaps the first
images of horror that the scenes of real life stamped on my mind.
This good spinster had in her composition a strong vein of the
superstitious, and was pleased, among other fancies, to read
alone in her chamber by a taper fixed in a candlestick which she
had had formed out of a human skull. One night this strange
piece of furniture acquired suddenly the power of locomotion,
and, after performing some odd circles on her chimney-piece,
fairly leaped on the floor, and continued to roll about the
apartment. Mrs. Swinton calmly proceeded to the adjoining room
for another light, and had the satisfaction to penetrate the
mystery on the spot. Rats abounded in the ancient building she
inhabited, and one of these had managed to ensconce itself within
her favourite MEMENTO MORI. Though thus endowed with a more than
feminine share of nerve, she entertained largely that belief in
supernaturals which in those times was not considered as sitting
ungracefully on the grave and aged of her condition; and the
story of the Magic Mirror was one for which she vouched with
particular confidence, alleging indeed that one of her own family
had been an eye-witness of the incidents recorded in it.
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