One lady, my next neighbor, whom personally I knew, living
at the moment, during the absence of her husband, with a few servants in a
very solitary house, never rested until she had placed eighteen doors (so
she told me, and, indeed, satisfied me by ocular proof), each secured by
ponderous bolts, and bars, and chains, between her own bedroom and any
intruder of human build. To reach her, even in her drawing-room, was like
going, as a flag of truce, into a beleaguered fortress; at every sixth
step one was stopped by a sort of portcullis. The panic was not confined
to the rich; women in the humblest ranks more than once died upon the
spot, from the shock attending some suspicious attempts at intrusion upon
the part of vagrants, meditating probably nothing worse than a robbery,
but whom the poor women, misled by the London newspapers, had fancied to
be the dreadful London murderer. Meantime, this solitary artist, that
rested in the centre of London, self-supported by his own conscious
grandeur, as a domestic Attila, or 'scourge of God;' this man, that walked
in darkness, and relied upon murder (as afterwards transpired) for bread,
for clothes, for promotion in life, was silently preparing an effectual
answer to the public journals; and on the twelfth day after his inaugural
murder, he advertised his presence in London, and published to all men the
absurdity of ascribing to _him_ any ruralizing propensities, by striking a
second blow, and accomplishing a second family extermination.
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