is head slowly, looked round him with a vacant stare, and, after
a few moments, muttered again the word "hour." I pulled out my watch, and
told him that it was twenty minutes past one, he understood me, as I
thought; and pronouncing indistinctly "mother," he again sank into apparent
listlessness. The men again resumed their work.

Meanwhile, a buzz from without intimated too distinctly that the mob was
collecting to witness the fate of their townsman. There was no distinct
sound, save that which a mass of people, under the depressing feelings of
sorrow, seem to send forth involuntarily--making the air, as it were,
thick, and yet with no articulation or distinct noise which can be caught
by the ear of one at a distance, or within the walls of a house. Eugene, I
am satisfied, was unable to recognise the faint indication. It was well for
him. I learned, from the turnkey, that the sound of the hammer in the
erection of the gallows had put him almost distracted, and precipitated the
execution of the purpose, which he had wished to delay till after the
arrival of the mail. I had little doubt that he might now be kept from the
grasp of the death-stupor for the remaining three quarters of an hour; but,
alas! what would be my triumph? Every minute added to the certainty that I
was only preparing for him and his relations greater pain; for, in any
view, he could not walk to the fatal spot without as much aid as might have
sufficed to carry him; and it was even more than probable that he would be
so overcome that that latter operation would require to be resorted to,
under the stern sanction of a law that behoved to be put in force within a
given time, or not at all. The case I am now describing might suggest some
consideration worthy of the attention of our legislators, who, arrogating
to themselves a license as wide as the limits of the human mind, deny all
manner of discretion to the superintendents of the last execution of the
law. We profess to be abhorrent from scenes of torture, as well as, on
grounds of policy, hostile to a species of punishment which, indeed,
defeats its own ends; and yet I could give more than one case where the
substance has been retained in all its atrocity, while the form was veiled
by flimsy excuses of a false necessity. My situation was now a very painful
one indeed. I was training and supporting the victim for the altar;
rescuing from death only to sacrifice him with more bloody rites and a
crueller