410 THE TWIN SISTERS. 



shower of maledictions, which sounded in the dark room, mingled as 

 they were with his renewed groans, like the ravings of a fiend. He 

 vainly strove to rise for the purpose of ejecting her, if with no worse 

 intention. He was chained to his bed, however, by the icy hand of 

 rapidly approaching death. Having exhausted her strength or her 

 eloquence, she sat down upon the bedside, and speedily sunk into 

 drunken sleep, throwing herself directly across his body. Writhing 

 with all the desperation of a fierce heart yet untamed, he strove to 

 remove her. He was become feeble as an infant : his hands vainly 

 essayed to drag her away, or to wake her : throwing himself back, 

 it seemed to him as if the whole world might be pressing upon his 

 convulsed chest. She lay torpid, almost dead, stretched over the 

 agonized man, and accelerating his certain destruction. Curses and 

 invocations of pity reached her not. In accents weak from the 

 disease, and half-choked by her pressure, he whispered in a thick 

 and panting voice, " In pity, in mercy, awake ! arise! I am choking! 

 dying! have compassion, horrible woman! Hell and furies ! I lie 

 like a crushed snake; yet I cannot clutch her! my arms are pinioned 

 by some invisible fiend : hence ! leave me ! let me but grasp her for 

 a moment! She is killing me ! Save me ! my children ! my wife ! Oh 

 God ! I am suffocating ! " 



He was answered only by the apoplectic snoring of the in- 

 toxicated and insensible woman. His whispering became inaudible, 

 but his torture seemed to increase. As her chest rose and fell, 

 some vast engine appeared to be at work, which threatened 

 at every stroke to crush him to atoms. Stirred by some in- 

 ternal uneasiness, she slightly changed her position, and one of her 

 arms fell upon his face, partially obstructing his already imperfect 

 respiration. His feeble struggles would have served as easily to have 

 removed a mountain : he was fast dying, but his intellect remained 

 clear, and his sensations unimpaired. Gasping tortured choking 

 his struggles became weaker and weaker : at last he lay still ; one 

 violent and convulsive effort, and he was dead ! 



In this state they were found early in the morning by the 

 medical man, the still sleeping and stupified nurse resting upon the 

 livid and blackened corpse of James Asper. 



The twin sisters, though shocked by such a sudden and awful 

 mortality, felt no sorrow; but their pure hearts grieved that he 

 should have been removed, unrepentant and unfitted as he was, for 

 appearing before Him whose hand had again, they piously believed, 

 manifested itself in their behalf. They never returned to the cot- 

 tage, but at once removed to a small house in the immediate out- 

 skirts of a neighbouring town, where they are now living, equally loved 

 and beloving. They have fully recovered their beauty ; and though a 

 shadow caused by the memory of the sad event, which had so cruelly 

 blighted their happiness for a time, occasionally passes over their 

 fair faces, they are the most joyous of the joyous, the most happy of 

 the happy. 



A. de T . 



