I, like a naughty boy, flung it down; the shell cracked, and the contents poured out on the pavement.

My mother saw it, and her exclamation, 'Wicked child, you have murdered your brother!' was often repeated to me in after-years.

It never struck me as particularly motherly." Here he paused, gazing meditatively into vacancy, and then asked the girl, who had listened intently: "Were you never haunted by a word so that you could not be rid of it ?" "Oh, yes," cried Melissa; "a striking rhythm in a song, or a line of poetry--" Caracalla nodded agreement, and went on more vehemently: "That is what I experienced at the words, 'You have murdered your brother!' I not only heard them now and then with my inward ear, but incessantly, like the dreary hum of the flies in my camp-tent, for hours at a time, by day and by night.

No fanning could drive these away.

The diabolical voice whispered loudest when Geta had done anything to vex me; or if things had been given him which I did not wish him to have.