.

When the rioters first assembled before the building, the murderer was
roused from sleep--if such slumbers as his may have that blessed
name--by the roar of voices, and the struggling of a great crowd. He
started up as these sounds met his ear, and sitting on his bedstead,
listened.

After a short interval of silence the noise burst out again. Still
listening attentively, he made out in course of time that the jail was
besieged by a furious multitude. His guilty conscience instantly arrayed
these men against himself, and brought the fear upon him that he would
be singled out and torn to pieces.

Once impressed with the terror of this conceit, everything tended to
confirm and strengthen it. His double crime, the circumstances under
which it had been committed, the length of time that had elapsed, and
its discovery in spite of all, made him as it were the visible object of
the Almighty's wrath. In all the crime and vice and moral gloom of the
great pest-house of the capital, he stood alone, marked and singled out
by his great guilt, a Lucifer among the devils. The other prisoners were
a host, hiding and sheltering each other--a crowd like that without the
walls. He was one man against the whole united concourse; a single,
solitary, lonely man, from whom the very captives in the jail fell off
and shrunk appalled.

It might be that the intelligence of his capture having been bruited
abroad, they had come there purposely to drag him out and kill him in
the street; or it might be that they were the rioters, and in pursuance
of an old design had come to sack the prison. But in either case he had
no belief or hope that they would spare him. Every shout they raised and
every sound they made was a blow upon his heart. As the attack went on,
he grew more wild and frantic in his terror; tried to pull away the bars
that guarded the chimney and prevented him from climbing up; called
loudly on the turnkeys to cluster round the cell and save him from the
fury of the rabble, or put him in some dungeon underground, no matter of
what depth, how dark it was, or loathsome, or beset with rats and
creeping things, so that it hid him and was hard to find.

But no one came, or answered him. Fearful, even while he cried to them,
of attracting attention, he was silent. By-and-by he saw, as he looked
from his grated window, a strange glimmering on the stone walls and
pavement of the yard. It was feeble at first, and came and went, as
thou