Beadle's Dime Novels No. 14 — page 78: what you’re looking at

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

76 THE EMERALD NECKLACE. home, allowing Noyse to infer that he was hurrying on to New York. - Curiously enough Pennon took with him the Emerald Necklace. It was entirely by accident that he did so. He had intended to give it into Mrs. Percy’s hands to return to her daughter; and had placed it in a small box and set it on his toilet-table, that he might not forget to do so. . The box which he had converted into an impromptu jewel-casket, we are obliged to confess, had once contained tooth-powder; and had been fished for the occasion out of the depths of Pennon’s trunk. When he came to leave so hastily, the whereabouts of the jewels disappeared from his memory, the tooth-powder was packed up—and it was not until making his toilet, the morning after his arrival at the castle, that he was surprised by the wierd, unnatural gems flashing at’ him, as wicked eyes will sometimes flash, in place of the harmless dentifrice into which the brash was ready to descend. At that moment those magnificent emeralds looked to him like the living eyes of serpents, and he returned the cover to the box ‘hastily and with nervous trepidation. It was the first time he had ever perceived any thing ominous about them; hitherto they had appeared to him invested with that tender eharm given them by the fact of Clematis having worn them about - her throat; but now there was something - baleful in their green light. A sudden shadow fell upon the cheerful cham- ber. When he descended to the solitary breakfast, prepared and served with faultless skill by the housekeeper, snatches of old stories and legends kept humming through his head, as hor- nets will hum in’ chambers from which they ought to be ban- ished—ugly traditions, all of which had an odor of witchcraft or poisoning about them—of the old Italian eras of treachery and assassination—of the French and English era of love- philters and poisonings—of hideous hags and withered magi- cians. . In the rich aroma of his cup of coffee he detected the flavor of a love-philter; in the cream-gravy of the fricassee chicken was a lurking sayor of some subtle poison; the faithful and innocent housekeeper, as she came in with a plate of hot rolls, appeared to hima wrinkled beldam, conspired with spirits for comliclooks.com