so short a time to live, the first to whom the dread of being
burnt occurred, but they were, throughout, the most importunate of all:
for they could be plainly heard, notwithstanding the great thickness of
the walls, crying that the wind set that way, and that the flames would
shortly reach them; and calling to the officers of the jail to come
and quench the fire from a cistern which was in their yard, and full
of water. Judging from what the crowd outside the walls could hear from
time to time, these four doomed wretches never ceased to call for
help; and that with as much distraction, and in as great a frenzy of
attachment to existence, as though each had an honoured, happy life
before him, instead of eight-and-forty hours of miserable imprisonment,
and then a violent and shameful death.

But the anguish and suffering of the two sons of one of these men, when
they heard, or fancied that they heard, their father's voice, is past
description. After wringing their hands and rushing to and fro as if
they were stark mad, one mounted on the shoulders of his brother, and
tried to clamber up the face of the high wall, guarded at the top with
spikes and points of iron. And when he fell among the crowd, he was not
deterred by his bruises, but mounted up again, and fell again, and, when
he found the feat impossible, began to beat the stones and tear them
with his hands, as if he could that way make a breach in the strong
building, and force a passage in. At last, they cleft their way among
the mob about the door, though many men, a dozen times their match, had
tried in vain to do so, and were seen, in--yes, in--the fire, striving
to prize it down, with crowbars.

Nor were they alone affected by the outcry from within the prison. The
women who were looking on, shrieked loudly, beat their hands together,
stopped their ears; and many fainted: the men who were not near the
walls and active in the siege, rather than do nothing, tore up the
pavement of the street, and did so with a haste and fury they could
not have surpassed if that had been the jail, and they were near their
object. Not one living creature in the throng was for an instant still.
The whole great mass were mad.

A shout! Another! Another yet, though few knew why, or what it meant.
But those around the gate had seen it slowly yield, and drop from its
topmost hinge. It hung on that side by but one, but it was upright
still, because of the bar, and its having sunk, of