The Mysteries of the Court of London by Pauline Clarendon — page 244: what you’re looking at

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

CHAPTER XXV A NIGHT OF TERRORS It was evening — half-past nine on the second evening of Caroline Walters’s residence in the house of Mrs. Lindley, the midwife. The young girl was seated alone in her chamber, listening to the hurricane that raged without; for the gale blew in terrific blasts, now rushing over the turbid Thames as if with a violence and a power sufficient to hurl down the very bridges themselves, then sweeping along the narrow street, and apparently enveloping that particular house with all its whirlwind might, now lulling for a short interval into a dreary succession of moaning sounds, and then, again col- lecting its appalling energies for a renewal of its tempestuous fury. The chamber allotted to the young girl was on the second floor, and at the back of the house. Its windows therefore 'ooked upon the Thames; but as the river, even at full tide, was much lower than the street, that casement was a con- siderable height above the water. And it was full tide now, and, as she sat in her room, Caroline could hear, during each occasional lull of the wind- storm, the plash of the rapid current against the piles which served as buttresses to the foundations of the dwelling. Those sounds, so ominous and drear, struck terror to her heart; for they seemed mingled with the moans of drowning men,— and the thought that a watery grave lay ready there, beneath the very window, was suggestive of horrible ideas of suicide as a relief to this world’s care and suffering. Yes, it was but a step, a single step, that lay between the unhappy girl and the waters of oblivion; and yet she dared not take it— Oh, no — no! 241 CONnnicloool KS (EQ)