work, or the mob will hoot you as a craven headsman from the scaffold."

The old man was obliged to repeat his admonition before it reached
the senses of his unconscious son-in-law. Long accustomed to yield
unresisting obedience, Florian slowly raised his eyes, at the moment
when the executioner's assistant, after showing the criminal's head to
the multitude, turned round and held out to him the bleeding and ghastly
object.--Gracious Heaven! what were his feelings when he encountered a
well-known face--when he saw the yellow pock-marked visage of Bartholdy,
whose widely-opened milk-blue eyes were fixed upon him in the glassy,
dim, and vacant stare of death!

Paralysed with sudden and overwhelming horror, he fell senseless into
the arms of the headsman, who had watched this critical moment, and,
with ready self-possession, loudly attributed to recent illness an
incident so puzzling to the spectators. He succeeded ere long in rousing
Florian to an imperfect sense of his critical situation, and, supporting
his tottering frame, led him to the house of the deceased executioner.
For an hour after their arrival, the unhappy youth sat mute and
motionless--the living image of despair. Agony in him had passed
its wildest paroxysm, and settled down into a blind and mechanical
unconsciousness. The old man, who began to suspect some extraordinary
reason for emotion so excessive, compelled him to swallow several
glasses of wine, and anxiously besought him to explain the cause of his
impassioned deportment. It was long, however, before the disconsolate
Florian regained the power of utterance. At length a burst of tears
relieved him. "I knew him!" he began, in a voice broken by convulsive
sobs. "He was once my friend. Oh, my father! there is no hope for me! I
am a doomed man--a murderer! He stands before me ever, and demands my
blood in atonement for his destruction. How can I justify such guilt? I
never knew his crime--I cannot even fancy him a criminal--but I well
remember that he loved and cherished me. Away, my father, if you love
me, to the judges! I _must_ know his crime, or the pangs I feel will
never depart from me."

The executioner, in whose stern and inflexible nature feelings of pity,
and even of repentance, were now at work, hastened to obtain some
information, and returned in half an hour, with indications of anxiety
and doubt too obvious to escape the unhappy Florian, who, with folded
hands, exclaimed, "For God-sake, f