your
shoulders. Be more a man, Florian. If thus daunted at the sight of
another's execution, how would you face your own, if destined to mount
the scaffold?"

"Face my own!" exclaimed Florian, shuddering at the suggestion. "God
forbid! I shall take good care to avoid it."

"Say not so," rejoined Bartholdy; "no man can avoid his doom; and it may
be yours or mine to die upon the scaffold. _Avoid it_, indeed! I wish
from my soul that you had never uttered those unlucky words. How often
do the very evils we most carefully shun fall upon our devoted heads! My
mind has been long made up to avoid nothing; and, soon as I become my
own master, I will throw myself on the world, and grapple with it
boldly. _Avoid_ your destiny, indeed! Beware of using those words again;
for, trust me, Florian, they bode no good to you."

The timid Florian felt his blood freeze as he listened; but,
recollecting himself, he was about to express his perfect reliance upon
the integrity of his life and principles, when he shuddered with new
dismay as he recollected the judicial murder of Calas, and considered
the complexities of human and circumstantial evidence. In deep and
silent dejection, he walked homeward with his friend. He felt as if his
existence had been blighted by some sudden and dreadful calamity; and
even fancied that he saw his future fate rising before him in storm and
darkness, through which menacing images were indistinctly shadowed.
Bartholdy, meanwhile, appeared as much exhilarated as if returning from
a comedy, and amused himself with making sarcastic and ludicrous remarks
upon the saddened countenances of the returning spectators.

The lapse of several months gradually weakened the strong hold which the
execution, and the strange comments of Bartholdy, had laid upon the
imagination of Florian, but they tended to increase the timid indecision
of his character, and induced a disposition to endure, in uncomplaining
silence, many school annoyances, which more energy of character would
have easily repelled. An extraordinary incident, however, gave a new
turn to his situation. About six months after the execution, Bartholdy
suddenly disappeared from the seminary; and this unaccountable event, by
which Florian was the only sufferer, was neither explained nor even
alluded to by the reverend fathers. To the scholars, who in vain sought
an explanation of this mystery from the friend of Bartholdy, it was for
some weeks a subject of wonde