Читать книгу Charles Peace, or The Adventures of a Notorious Burglar онлайн

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His wife, Jane Ashbrook, was dead!

She had passed peacefully and silently away. There was no expression of pain on her countenance, albeit she had died of a broken heart.

The wretch Gregson had suffered death for the murder of young Hopgood, but the fatal blow received by that ill-fated young man was the cause of another death. Jane Ryan had perished therefrom.

It is true she lived for ten years after the loss of her sweetheart, but she never recovered from the effects of the terrible scene she had witnessed, and hers is not a solitary instance of cases of this sort—​albeit, the world knows but little of them.

Life is like a fountain fed by a thousand streams that perish if one is dried. It is a silver chord twisted with a thousand strings that part asunder if one is broken.

Thoughtless mortals are surrounded by innumerable dangers that render it much more strange that they escape so long than that they almost all perish so suddenly at last.

We are encompassed with accidents every day to crush the decaying tenements we inhabit.