stery of them. You must learn, therefore, to be their
tyrant, for if you be not, be well assured that they will be
yours--and merciless tyrants they are to the wretches who become their
subjects."

"I will remember what you say, sir," answered the boy, "and, indeed, I
am not like to forget it, for, altogether, this is the saddest day I
ever have passed; and this is the most horrible and appalling story
that I ever have heard told. It was but just that the Lord of
Kerguelen should die, for he did a murder; and since the law punishes
that in a peasant, it must do so likewise with a noble. But to break
him upon the wheel!--it is atrocious! I should have thought all the
nobles of the land would have applied to the king to spare him that
horror."

"Many of them did apply, Raoul; but the king, or his ministers in his
name, made answer, that during the Regency the Count Horn was broken
on the wheel for murder, and therefore that to behead the Lord of
Kerguelen for the same offence, would be to admit that the Count was
wrongfully condemned."

"Out on it! out on it! what sophistry. Count Horn murdered a banker,
like a common thief, for his gold, and this unhappy lord hath done the
deed for which he must suffer in a mistaken sense of honor, and with
all tenderness compatible with such a deed. There is nothing similar
or parallel in the two cases; and if there were, what signifies it now
to Count Horn, whether he were condemned rightfully or no; are these
men heathen, that they would offer a victim to the offended manes of
the dead? But is there no hope, my father, that his sentence may be
commuted?"

"None whatsoever. Let us trust, therefore, that he has died penitent,
and that his sufferings are already over; and let us pray, ere we lay
us down to sleep, that his sins may be forgiven to him, and that his
soul may have rest."

"Amen!" replied the boy, solemnly, at the same moment that the
ecclesiastic repeated the same word, though he did so, as it would
seem, less from the heart, and more as a matter of course.

Nothing further was said on that subject, and in truth the
conversation ceased altogether. A gloom was cast over the spirits of
all present, both by the imagination of the horrors which were in
progress at that very moment, and by the recollection of the preceding
enormities of which this was but the consummation; but the young
Viscount Raoul was so completely engrossed by the deep thoughts which
that conversati