Samuel Johnson Is Indignant

Murder in Bohemia

In the city of Frydlant in Bohemia where all the people are anyway pale as ghosts and dressed in dark winter clothes, an old woman was unable any longer to bear the inevitable falling of her life into destitution and disgrace, and went mad and murdered out of pity her husband, her two sons, and her daughter, out of anger her neighbors on one side and her neighbors across the street, who had scorned her family, out of revenge the grocer from whom she had had to beg for credit, and the pawnbroker, and two moneylenders, then a streetcar conductor whom she did not know, and finally — rushing with her long knife into the Town Hall — the young mayor and one of his councilmen as they sat puzzling over an amendment.