heads; the very air is tainted with their
odour--we smell it where we are. Our amateur friends are in excellent
spirits; they have not seen so many people at an execution for some
years. They are agreeably surprised; they all thought the man would not
have been hung, and had backed their opinions by bets.

A long wearisome night was it, even to us--and it is not yet eight. The
roar of the crowd is so great--can _he_ hear it within?--that we cannot
catch the sound of the neighbouring chimes; but we see signs that the end
is approaching. The police have filled up the intervening space between
the scaffold and the crowd. A bell tinkles dismally, horridly. We look
beyond the scaffold down into the open doorway, and there they are,
ascending the stairs. First the chaplain, then the criminal, and then
Jack Ketch. Marley walks steadily, with pale face and eyes cast down,
and places himself immediately under the rope. He trembles slightly as
his legs are being fastened, his hands had already been pinioned behind.
A nightcap is drawn over his face, the rope is adjusted round his neck,
Jack Ketch hastens down the ladder, the chaplain, reading the burial
service all the while, steps back, down goes the drop, a woman or two
shrieks, there is a slight convulsive movement of the body, and what was
a minute back a living man is now a dishonoured corpse. There he dangles
in the cold north wind for an hour. We cannot get away, as the crowd is
determined to see the last of it, and will not move. It stops to hoot
Jack Ketch, as he comes to cut Marley down at nine o'clock. Till then,
there he hangs, a tall, well-made man, with fine dark whiskers, in his
very prime, heedless of the sixty thousand glaring eyes all round, with
hands clasped as if supplicating that divine mercy which all born of
woman need, and which may God grant us in our dying hour. Away hastes
the crowd to its business or its pleasure; and when a short time after I
pass by the very spot where that hideous throng had stood, blaspheming in
the very presence of death, butchers' and carriers' carts filled up the
vacant space, and the past night seemed a ghastly dream.

CATHERINE-STREET.

Strand, is a busy place by day-time (it does a great business in the
newspaper line, and about four or five in the afternoon it is used by the
acute newsboys of the metropolis as a kind of Change), but it is busier
far by night, and the later the hour the more active an