circle of faggots in the centre of the
market-place and bound all three to the tall middle pillar. Then the
common hangman, a huge, heavy-featured Swabian--a butcher by usual
occupation--stepped forward and demanded in the accustomed formula: 'If
by the will of God and His representatives of law and order on earth,
these miserable men were to be sent to their eternal punishment?' The
chief officer of law made answer that such was the 'will of Heaven and of
the very noble Prince, our Lord Eberhard Ludwig, Duke and Ruler of
Wirtemberg.' Then a member of the privy council rose, and in solemn tones
read the indictment of Friedrich Haberle, the murderer, and Johannes
Schwan, the horse-stealer, condemned to be burned at the stake, together
with the effigy of the detestable traitor and purloiner of State monies,
Christoph Peter Forstner.

In spite of the threatened penalty, a murmur ran through the onlookers.
They had expected to see a lifeless thing burned, but could they indeed
be forced to witness the burning of two living men? The execution of a
witch was another thing--they enjoyed that; but in cold blood to watch
two human beings, not horrible magicians but merely sinners--to see these
creatures burned along with that ghastly, lifeless, waxen thing,--that
was awesome! A woman in one of the windows screamed, a child in the crowd
below lifted a wailing cry. Perhaps the whole thing was inconsistent!
What difference between the holocaust of a witch and that of two vile
criminals? What matter to the dying men that an absurd image should be
burned with them? yet there lay some indescribable horror in it.

The hangman advanced and applied a flaming torch to the tar-smeared
faggots, which began to hiss and splutter in the still, frosty, winter
air.

'Hold!' cried the privy councillor, 'unbind those men! Friedrich Haberle
and Johannes Schwan are reprieved from death, their sentence is commuted
to flogging and banishment. Beside Christoph Peter Forstner's crimes
these men have hardly transgressed. It is the will of his Highness that
they should go free, in token of his wise mercy and to let you see how
sure is his justice! And against so lenient a Prince has this odious
traitor Forstner conspired! Hangman, do your work upon his image in
symbol of his well-deserved punishment, from which the unjust protection
of a foreign monarch shields the actual person of this criminal. But let
this symbol of death be ever present in the soul