The String of Pearls (1850), p. 203

trade, and firmly clutching it in his right hand, while he carried the candle in his left, he once more approached the staircase.
"I do not think," he said, "that for nine years now any mortal footsteps, but my own, have trod upon these stairs or upon the flooring of the rooms above. Woe be to those who may now attempt to do so. Woe, I say, be to them, for their death is at hand."
These words were spoken in a deep hollow voice, that sounded like tones from a sepulchre, as they came from the lips of that man of many crimes. To give Todd his due, he did not seem to shrink from the unknown and dimly appreciated danger that might be up stairs in his house. He was courageous, but it
was not the high-souled courage that nerves a man to noble deeds. No, Sweeney Todd's courage was that of hate—hatred to the whole human race,
which he considered, with a strange inconsistency, had conspired against him; whereas he had been the one to place an impassable barrier between himself and
the amenities of society. He ascended the stairs with great deliberation. When he reached the landing upon the first floor, he cast his eyes suspiciously about him, shading the light as he did so with his hand—that same hand that held
the knife, the shadow of which fell upon the wall in frightful proportions.
"All is still," he said. "Is fancy, after all, only playing me such tricks as she might have played me twenty years ago ? I thought I was too old for such freaks of the imagination."
Todd did not suspect that there was a second period in his life, when the mental infirmities of his green youth might come back to him, with many superadded horrors accumulated, with a consciousness of guilt. He slowly approached a
door and pushed it open, saying as he did so—
"No—no—no. Above all things, I must not be superstitious. If I were so, into what a world of horrors might I not plunge. No—no, I will not people the
darkness with horrible phantasies, I will not think that it is possible that men with

Twenty murders on their heads,"

can revisit this world to drive those who have done them to death with shrieking madness—this world do I say? There is no other. Bah! Priests may talk, and the weak-brained fools who gape at what they do not understand, may believe them, but when man dies—when the electric condition that has imputed to his humanity what is called life, flies, he is indeed

"Dust to dust!"

Ha! ha! I have lived as I will die, fearing nothing and believing nothing." As he uttered those words—words which found no real echo in his heart, for at the bottom of it lay a trembling belief in, and a dread of the great God that rules all things, and who is manifest in the meanest seeming thing that crawls upon the earth—he entered one of the rooms upon that floor, and glanced uneasily around him. All was still. There were trunks—clothes upon chairs, and a vast amount of miscellaneous property in this room, but nothing in the shape of a human being. Todd's spirits rose, and he held the long knife more carelessly than he had done.
"Pho! pho!" he said. "I do, indeed, at times make myself the slave of a disturbed fancy. Pho! pho! I will no more listen to vague sounds, meaning nothing; but wrapping myself up in my consciousness of having nothing to fear, I will pursue my course, hideous though it may be."
He turned and took his way towards the landing place of the staircase again. He was now carrying both the light and the knife rather carelessly, and everybody knows that when a candle is held before a person's face, that but little
indeed can be seen in the hazy vapour that surrounds it. So it was with Todd. He had got about two paces from the door, when a strange consciousness of something being in his way came over him. He immediately raised his hand—
that hand that still carried the knife, to shade the light, and then, horror! horror He saw standing upon the landing a figure attired in faded apparel, whose face was dabbled in blood, and the stony eyes which were fixed upon the face of