Page:In the dozy hours, and other papers.djvu/94

cluster around the mirror, and are familiar to us all. To break one is everywhere an evil omen. "Seven years' trouble, but no want," follow fast upon such a mishap in Yorkshire, while in Scotland, the cracking of a looking-glass, like the falling of the doomed man's picture from the wall, is a presage of approaching death. Such portents as these, however,—though no one who is truly wise presumes to treat them with levity,—are powerless to thrill us with that indefinable and subtle horror which springs from causeless emotions. Scott, in his prologue to "Aunt Margaret's Mirror," has well defined the peculiar fear which is without reason and without cure. The old lady who makes her servant maid draw a curtain over the glass before she enters her bedroom, "so that she" (the maid) "may have the first shock of the apparition, if there be any to be seen," is of far too practical a turn to trouble herself about the rationality of her sensations, "Like many other honest folk," she does not like to look at her own reflection by candlelight, because it is an eerie thing to do. Yet the tale she tells of the Paduan doctor and his magic mir-