the meantime paused not in his flight till morning dawned—­and still as he fled, the noise of steps seemed to pursue him, and the cry of his assassins still sounded in the distance.  Ten miles off he reached a village, and spread instant alarm throughout the neighbourhood—­the inhabitants were aroused with one accord into a tumult of indignation—­several of them had lost sons, brothers, or friends on the heath, and all united in proceeding instantly to seize the old woman and her sons, who were nearly torn to pieces by their violence.  Three gibbets were immediately raised on the moor, and the wretched culprits confessed before their execution to the destruction of nearly fifty victims in the Murder Hole which they pointed out, and near which they suffered the penalty of their crimes.  The bones of several murdered persons were with difficulty brought up from the abyss into which they had been thrust; but so narrow is the aperture, and so extraordinary the depth, that all who see it are inclined to coincide in the tradition of the country people that it is unfathomable.  The scene of these events still continues nearly as it was 300 years ago.  The remains of the old cottage, with its blackened walls (haunted of course by a thousand evil spirits,) and the extensive moor, on which a more modern inn (if it can be dignified with such an epithet) resembles its predecessor in every thing but the character of its inhabitants; the landlord is deformed, but possesses extraordinary genius; he has himself manufactured a violin, on which he plays with untaught skill,—­and if any discord be heard in the house, or any murder committed in it, this is his only instrument.  His daughter (who has never travelled beyond the heath) has inherited her father’s talent, and learnt all his tales of terror and superstition, which she relates with infinite spirit; but when you are led by her across the heath to drop a stone into that deep and narrow gulf to which our story relates,—­when you stand on its slippery edge, and (parting the long grass with which it is covered) gaze into its mysterious depths,—­when she describes, with all the animation of an eye witness, the struggles of the victims grasping the grass as a last hope of preservation, and trying to drag in their assassin as an expiring effort of vengeance,—­when you are told that for 300 years the clear waters in this diamond of the desert have remained untasted by mortal lips, and that the solitary traveller is still pursued at night by the howling of the bloodhound,—­it is then only that it is possible fully to appreciate the terrors of THE MURDER HOLE.

Blackwood’s Magazine.

* * * * *

DANCING.

    I never to a ball will go,
      That poor pretence for prancing,
    Where Jenkins dislocates a toe,
      And Tomkins thinks he’s dancing: 
    And most I execrate that ball,
      Of balls the most atrocious,
    Held yearly in old Magog’s hall,
      The feasting and ferocious.