of any adventitious noise has ceased.

"Now we may expect the pretty bride and her maids," continued Peterchen,
winking at his companions, as the ancient gallant is wont to make a parade
of his admiration of the fair; "the solemn ceremony is to be pronounced
here, before the authorities, as a suitable termination to this happy day.
Ah! my good old friend Melchior, neither of us is the man he was, or these
skipping hoydens would not go through their pirouettes without some aid
from our arms! Now, dispose of yourselves, friends; for this is to be no
acting, but a downright marriage, and it is meet that we keep a graver
air. How! what means the movement among the officers?"

Peterchen had interrupted himself, for just at that moment the
thief-takers entered the square in a body, inclosing in their centre a
group, who had the mien of captives too evidently to be mistaken for
honest men. The bailiff was peculiarly an executive officer; one of that
class who believe that the enactment of a law is a point of far less
interest than its due fulfilment. Indeed, so far did he push his favorite
principle, that he did not hesitate sometimes to suppose shades of meaning
in the different ordinances of the great council that existed only in his
own brain, but which were, to do him justice, sufficiently convenient to
himself in carrying out the constructions which he saw fit to put on his
own duties. The appearance of an affair of justice was unfortunate for the
progress of the ceremonies, Peterchen having some such relish for the
punishment of rogues, and more especially for such as seemed to be an
eternal reproach to the action of the Bernese system by their incorrigible
misery and poverty, as an old coachman is proverbially said to retain for
the crack of the whip. All his judicial sympathies were not fully
awakened, on the present occasion, however: the criminals, though far from
belonging to the more lucky of their fellow-creatures, not being quite
miserable enough in appearance to awaken all those powers of magisterial
reproach and severity that lay dormant in the bailiff's moral temperament,
ready, at any time, to vindicate the right of the strong against the
innovations of the feeble and unhappy. The reader will at once have
anticipated that the prisoners were Maso and his companions, who had been
more successful in escaping from their keepers, than fortunate in evading
the attempts to secure their persons a second time.

"Who