im trouble, I at once said that I would pay
three florins a day for myself, and one for the accommodation of my horse.

"He thinks we keep an inn!" the little child screamed through her
laughter. I instantly collapsed.

PUBLIC EXECUTIONS IN ENGLAND.

One Saturday morning toward the close of November or beginning of
December, I have forgotten the precise date, a letter was put into my hand
at the office. It was from my quondam friend and employer the cutler
editor, as whose agent I occasionally acted, and who charged me with a
commission to procure him certain "sorts" from the foundry and transmit
them by coach, in time for his next impression. Not choosing to disappoint
my wife and lose my dinner, I deferred the visit to the foundry until
after work in the evening; when, upon arriving at Chiswell-street, I found
the men in the act of leaving, but was informed I could have the materials
I wanted as early as I chose on Monday. On Monday morning, accordingly,
having risen rather earlier than usual and breakfasted by candle-light, I
set forth to execute my commission before proceeding to work. Crossing
Blackfriars-bridge, and barely noticing that there was an unusual
concourse of foot-passengers of the laboring and lower sorts, I turned up
Ludgate-hill, where I found the crowd still greater, less equivocally
disrespectable, and all hurrying forward at a rapid walking-pace. Intent
upon the object I had in view, I pushed forward as rapidly as the rest,
and turning sharp round into the Old Bailey, came suddenly upon a
spectacle which, of all others, was the farthest from my thoughts. It was
the morning of an execution. A thick damp haze filled the air, not
amounting to an actual fog, but sufficiently dense to confine the limits
of vision to a few hundred yards. The beams of the level sun threw an
almost supernatural light of a dim but fiery hue into the mist which they
yet had not force enough to penetrate; and there, darkly looming with grim
and shadow-like outline against a background of lurid vapor, rose the
gallows upon which a wretched fellow-creature was about to be
death-strangled and dangled in expiation of the crime of murder. In a
moment the commission I had in hand vanished from my thoughts, and,
impelled by a fearful and morbid curiosity, I suffered myself to be borne
by the pressure behind, every moment aggravated by the arrival of
trampling multitudes to the spot, toward the object of the general gaze.