lenty of girls ready to marry him in order to save his life!' And
even several days after the execution I heard the same thing repeated.
This belief, then universal among the lower class, must, I suppose,
have arisen from the fact that many French prisoners, condemned to the
stake by the savages, had owed their lives to the Indian women who had
married them. The sentence on M'Lane, however, was executed in all its
barbarity. I saw all with my own eyes, a big student named Boudrault
lifting me up from time to time in his arms so that I might lose
nothing of the horrible butchery. Old Dr. Duvert was near us, and he
drew out his watch as soon as Ward the hangman threw down the ladder
upon which M'Lane was stretched on his back, with the cord round his
neck made fast to the beam of the gallows....'He is quite dead,' said
Dr. Duvert, when the hangman cut down the body at the end of about
twenty-five minutes....The spectators who were nearest to the scaffold
say that the hangman then refused to proceed further with the
execution...and it was only after a good supply of guineas that the
sheriff succeeded in making him execute all the sentence, and that
after each act of the fearful drama his demands became more and more
exorbitant. Certain it is that after that time Mr. Ward became quite
a personage, never walking in the streets except with silk stockings,
a three-cornered hat, and a sword at his side. Two watches, one in his
breeches pocket and the other hanging from his neck by a silver chain,
completed his toilet."

[Illustration: HON. WILLIAM OSGOODE
(First Chief Justice of Upper Canada)]

With Black, the ship-carpenter who turned king's evidence against
M'Lane, the reward was far different. Blood-money failed to solace him
for the contumely heaped upon him; and, according to the historian
Garneau, he was so overcome by public contempt that after some years
he was reduced to begging his bread in the streets of Quebec.

[Illustration: NEW ST. LOUIS GATE]

Since the enactment of this gruesome tragedy more than a century ago,
the steep declivity which joins the Lower to the Upper Town, just
outside St. John's Gate, has retained the name of Gallows Hill. No
other executions appear to have taken place upon the spot, a
well-known hillock upon the Plains of Abraham having been for many
years the Golgotha of Quebec, while Gallows Hill only served this
purpose during a transition period. By 1814 we find an execution
taking pla