Disregarded, thrown aside, are a cloth and a besom: the cloth is wet still; but here and there the red stains are dry, and clotted as with bloody glue; and the hairs of the besom start up, torn and ragged, as if the bristles had a sense of some horror, as if things inanimate still partook of men's dread at men's deeds.

If you passed through the corridor and saw in the shadow of the wall that homeliest of instruments cast away and forgotten, you would smile at the slatternly housework.

But if you knew that a corpse had been borne down those stairs to the left,--borne along those floors to that marriage-bed,--with the blood oozing and gushing and plashing below as the bearers passed with their burden, then straight that dead thing would take the awe of the dead being; it told its own tale of violence and murder; it had dabbled in the gore of the violated clay; it had become an evidence of the crime.

No wonder that its hairs bristled up, sharp and ragged, in the shadow of the wall.
The first part of the tragedy ends; let fall the curtain.

When next it rises, years will have passed away, graves uncounted will have wrought fresh hollows in our merry sepulchre,--sweet earth! Take a sand from the shore, take a drop from the ocean,--less than sand-grain and drop in man's planet one Death and one Crime! On the map, trace all oceans, and search out every shore,--more than seas, more than lands, in God's balance shall weigh one Death and one Crime!.