dge of the past, and
prophetic imagination saw the future lowering upon the dismal present.
All night long, with the cunning of a madman--for all night long he had
still been mad--the miserable old man had been disengaging his hands
from the manacles, and that done, springing like a wild beast from his
cage, he flew out of the open door, nor could a horse's speed on that
fearful road have overtaken him before he reached the scaffold.

No need was there to hold the miserable man. He who had been so furious
in his manacles at Moorside, seemed now, to the people at a distance,
calm as when he used to sit in the elders' seat beneath the pulpit in
that small kirk. But they who were on or near the scaffold saw something
horrid in the fixedness of his countenance. "Let go your hold of me, ye
fools!" he muttered to some of the mean wretches of the law, who still
had him in their clutch--and tossing his hands on high, cried with a
loud voice, "Give ear, ye Heavens! and hear, O Earth! I am the
Violator--I am the Murderer!"

The moor groaned as in earthquake--and then all that congregation bowed
their heads with a rustling noise, like a wood smitten by the wind. Had
they heard aright the unimaginable confession? His head had long been
grey--he had reached the term allotted to man's mortal life here
below--threescore and ten. Morning and evening, never had the Bible been
out of his hands at the hour set apart for family worship. And who so
eloquent as he in expounding its most dreadful mysteries? The
unregenerate heart of man, he had ever said--in scriptural phrase--was
"desperately wicked." Desperately wicked indeed! And now again he tossed
his arms wrathfully--so the wild motion looked--in the wrathful skies.
"I ravished--I murdered her--ye know it, ye evil spirits in the depths
of hell!" Consternation now fell on the minds of all--and the truth was
clear as light--and all eyes knew at once that now indeed they looked on
the murderer. The dreadful delusion under which all their understandings
had been brought by the power of circumstances, was by that voice
destroyed--the obduracy of him who had been about to die was now seen to
have been the most heroic virtue--the self-sacrifice of a son, to save a
father from ignominy and death.

"O monster, beyond the reach of redemption! and the very day after the
murder, while the corpse was lying in blood on the Moor, he was with us
in the House of God! Tear him in pieces--rend him limb