. The victim was then seized on, swept away into the darkness,
and after a brief pause I heard a shriek and a crash; the sentence had
been fulfilled--all was over. The court now covered their heads with
their mantles, as if in sorrow for this formidable necessity.

But how shall I speak of the closing scene? However it surprised and
absorbed me in that moment of nervous excitement, I can allude to it
now only as characteristic of a time when every mind in France was
half lunatic. I saw a figure enveloped in star-coloured light emerge
from the darkness, slowly ascend, in a vesture floating round it like
the robes which Raphael or Guido gives to the beings of another
sphere, and, accompanied by a burst of harmony as it rose, ascend to
the roof, where it suddenly disappeared. All was instantly the silence
and the darkness of the grave.

Daylight brought back my senses, and I was convinced that the
pantomimic spirit of the people, however unaccountably it might
disregard proprieties, had been busy with the scene. I should now
certainly have abandoned the supernatural portion of the conjecture
altogether; but on mentioning it to Cassini, he let me into the
solution at once.

"Have you never observed," said he, "the passion of all people for
walking on the edge of a precipice, climbing a church tower, looking
down from a battlement, or doing any one thing which gives them the
nearest possible chance of breaking their necks?--then you can
comprehend the performance of last night. There we are, like fowls in
a coop: every day sees some of us taken out; and the amusement of the
remaining fowls is to imagine how the heads of the others were taken
from their bodies." The prisoners were practising a trial.

I gave an involuntary look of surprise at this species of amusement,
and remarked something on the violation of common feeling--to say
nothing of the almost profaneness which it involved.

"As to the feeling," said Cassini, with that shrug which no shoulders
but those of a Frenchman can ever give, "it is a matter of taste; and
perhaps we have no right to dictate in such matters to persons who
would think a week a long lease of life, and who, instead of seven
days, may not have so many hours. As to the profanation, if your
English scruples made you sensitive on such points, I can assure you
that you might have seen some things much more calculated to excite
your sensibilities. The display last night was simply the trial of a