soon to be. He was
taken a few days after with a handkerchief of the old man upon his neck.
So blind is blood-guiltiness.

Up to the hour of condemnation, he remained reckless as the
wind--unrepenting as the flint--venomous as the blind-worm. With that deep
and horrible cunning which is so often united to unprincipled ignorance,
he had almost involved in his fate another vagrant with whom he had
chanced to consort, and to whom he had disposed of some of the
blood-bought spoils. The circumstantial evidence was so involved and
interwoven, that the jury, after long and obvious hesitation as to the
latter, found both guilty; and the terrible sentence of death, within
forty-eight hours, was passed upon both. The culprit bore it without much
outward emotion; but when taken from the dock, his companion, infuriated
by despair and grief, found means to level a violent blow at the head of
his miserable and selfish betrayer, which long deprived the wretch of
sense and motion, and, for some time, was thought to have anticipated the
executioner. Would it had done so! But let me do my duty as I ought--let
me repress the horror which one scene of this dreadful drama never fails
to throw over my spirit--that I may tell my story as a man--and my
confession at least be clear. When the felon awoke out of the deathlike
trance into which this assault had thrown him, his hardihood was gone; and
he was reconveyed to the cell, in which he was destined agonizingly to
struggle out his last hideous and distorted hours, in a state of abject
horror which cannot be described. He who felt nothing--knew nothing--had
now his eyes opened with terrible clearness to one object--the livid
phantasma of a strangling death. All the rest was convulsive despair and
darkness. Thought shudders at it--but let me go on,

[He visits the murderer in prison, accompanied by the clergyman.]

I undertook to pass with the murderer--his LAST NIGHT--_such_ a last!--
but let me compose myself.

* * * * *

It was about the hour of ten, on a gusty and somewhat raw evening of
September, that I was locked up alone with the murderer. It was the
evening of the Sabbath. Some rain had fallen, and the sun had not been
long set without doors; but for the last hour and a half the dungeon had
been dark, and illuminated only by a single taper. The clergyman of the
prison, and some of my religious friends, had sat with us until the hour
of locking-up,