marched into the city at the head of a strong detachment, and
straightway proceeded to erect a very tall gibbet in front of the Hotel
de Ville. This looked practical in the eyes of the liberated and
reinstated magistrates, and Gosson, Crugeot, and the rest were summoned
at once before them. The advocate thought, perhaps, with a sigh, that his
judges, so recently his prisoners, might have been the fruit for another
gallowstree, had he planted it when the ground was his own; but taking
heart of grace, he encouraged his colleagues--now his fellow-culprits.
Crugeot, undismayed, made his appearance before the tribunal, arrayed in
a corslet of proof, with a golden hilted sword, a scarf embroidered with
pearls and gold, and a hat bravely plumaged with white, blue, and, orange
feathers--the colors of William the Silent--of all which finery he was
stripped, however, as soon as he entered the court.

The process was rapid. A summons from Brussels was expected every hour
from the general government, ordering the cases to be brought before the
federal tribunal; and as the Walloon provinces were not yet ready for
open revolt, the order would be an inconvenient one. Hence the necessity
for haste. The superior court of Artois, to which an appeal from the
magistrates lay, immediately held a session in another chamber of the
Hotel de Ville while the lower court was trying the prisoners, and
Bertoul, Crugeot, Mordacq, with several others, were condemned in a few
hours to the gibbet. They were invited to appeal, if they chose, to the
council of Artois, but hearing that the court was sitting next door, so
that there was no chance of a rescue in the streets, they declared
themselves satisfied with the sentence. Gosson had not been tried, his
case being reserved for the morrow.

Meantime, the short autumnal day had drawn to a close. A wild, stormy,
rainy night then set in, but still the royalist party--citizens and
soldiers intermingled--all armed to the teeth, and uttering fierce cries,
while the whole scene was fitfully illuminated with the glare of
flambeaux and blazing tar-barrels, kept watch in the open square around
the city hall. A series of terrible Rembrandt-like nightpieces
succeeded--grim, fantastic, and gory. Bertoul, an old man, who for years
had so surely felt himself predestined to his present doom that he had
kept a gibbet in his own house to accustom himself to the sight of the
machine, was led forth the first, and hanged at