Vashti's Fate — page 196: what you’re looking at

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

WORSE AND WORSE. ~ 191 wt It is said that many of them have died madmen. Iam told, however, that the old lord—Lord Roscoe Everleigh, who came to this country in its early settlement, and from whom you are directly descended, was a man loved as much as feared, which the Everleighs before him werenot. This same tradition says, that in him a good and an evil spirit contended for mastery, but he died a madman. Since his time, the curse, whatever it was, has seemed to take at least amore mitigated form. You know that you Everleighs have tempers that are as consuming fire. This element in your compositions is a relic of that old, wicked curse. In every generation of your family in this country it has come to a deadly fruition. Your great-grandfather was a mad- man at forty-five. Your grandfather burst a blood-vessel in an ebullition of anger, having first caused the death of his own wife, by a blow given in the heat of passion. Your father’s brother died in consequence of a willful persistency in a matter that he was warned would end fatally. Your father “ : She paused, sending a glance of lightning toward Philip, who stood with his face buried in his hands; over her features came that inexpressible change that always followed any allusion to Roscoe Everleigh. ‘‘Well—my father!” said the young man. ‘‘He gathered the same deadly fruit as the rest—it blasted his life; it has blasted your mother’s once bloom- ing existence; it has wrecked Philip. See there—an old man, with a breaking heart; see me, an old woman, before my time. The blow that struck him struck us all who loved him. Ah, woe is me!” The agony concentrated in her last words was beyond description : ‘*’Tell me, how did he die ?” com Cc 300 cs (elo) aA) .