The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 89: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

ee ac NN aad Nene! meng late ra A PLOT 71 by the first shock of the accident; she was in all other re- spects completely uninjured, and in a few minutes after her return to consciousness, she was enabled to rise and move about. The scene which presented itself to her contemplation was a frightful and a sad one. The line was encumbered in one part with the overturned carriages, and in another strown with the fragments of the shattered ones. Boxes, trunks, and portmanteaux were heaped pell-mell together, some having been broken open by the fall, and the articles of apparel, both male and female, all cast out and mixed together. On the slope of the embankment several wounded persons lay here and there, and in another part there was a horrible array of mutilated and disfigured corpses. As the eyes of Lettice wandered over this fearful grouping of the dead, her heart sickened within her, and she felt her brain reel, on catching sight of the apparel of her travelling com- panion, the unfortunate Mrs. Rayner. Yes, but it was only by the raiment that the deceased could be thus recognized, for her countenance was so horribly disfigured that scarcely a lineament, much less a trace of its former beauty, re- mained. Lettice — though, as the reader is aware, far from possessing any extreme sensibility was nevertheless shocked and horrified at this tragic occurrence which had thus cut off an amiable lady in the bloom of her youth as well as in the early summer of her beauty, and at the very time she was on her way to receive the inheritance be- queathed by her parents. Lettice staggered back as she averted her eyes from the shocking spectacle, and would have fallen if she had not been caught in the arms of the surgeon, who was still near her. Those who have been unfortunate enough to witness a terrific railway accident are but too painfully aware of the dread confusion which is superadded to the horror of the scene, and those who have been happy enough to escape such a spectacle may nevertheless grasp with their imagination the full range of its supervening circumstances. The moant of the wounded sufferers mingling with the shrieks, the cries, and the lamentations of relatives who have survived the dead, the hurrying to and fro of half-dismayed officials, the process of disencumbering the line as speedily as possible, and the flocking of horrified persons to the spot, when the accident occurs in the close vicinage of a town, — these are CORNICLOO <S) (E©) im