iday crowd that already pressed in a steady stream towards the
castle courtyard to see the hanging. In those days there were hangings
so many after assizes that an execution could hardly be said to
possess the interest of novelty. But there were circumstances enough
attending the forthcoming show to give it quite a piquancy of its own
in the eyes of the worthy Lancastrian burghers, who hurried with wives
and children to the place of doom, anxious to secure sitting or
standing room with a good view of the gallows-tree.

It was not every day, indeed, that a _gentleman_ was hanged. So
handsome a man, too, as the rumours went, and so dare-devil a fellow;
friend of the noble family of Landale, and a murderer of its most
respected member. Could justice ever have served up a spicier dish
whereon to regale the multitude?

First the courtyard, then, the walls, the roofs of the adjoining
houses, swarmed with an eager crowd. Every space of ground and slate
and tile, every ledge and window, was occupied. As thick as bees they
hung--men, women, and children; a sea of white faces pressed together,
each still, yet all as instinct with tremulous movement as a field of
corn in the wind; while the hoarse, indescribable murmur that seizes
one with so strange and fearsome an impression, the voice of the
multitude, rose and fell with a mighty pulsation, broken here and
there by the shriller cry of a child.

Overhead the sky, a delicious spring blue sky, flecked with tiny white
clouds, looked down like a great smile upon the crowd that laughed and
joked beneath.

No pity in heaven or on earth.

But as the felon came out into the air, which, warm and fickle, puffed
against his cheek, he cast one steady glance around upon the black
human hive and then looked up into the white flecked ether, without
the quiver of a nerve.

He drew the spring breath into his lungs with a grateful expansion of
his deep chest. How fresh it was! And the sky, how fair and blue!

As the eagerly expected group emerged from the prison door and was
greeted by a roar that curdled the blood in at least one woman's heart
there, an old Irish hag, who sat in a coign of vantage, hugging her
knees and crooning, a little black pipe held in her toothless jaws,
ceased her dismal hum to concentrate all her attention upon the
condemned man.

The creature was well known for miles around as a constant attendant
at such spectacles, and had become in the course of time a priv