if not of "Not Guilty," would be returned; but
_they_ had not been sworn to do justice before man and before God--and,
if need were, to seal up even the fountains of mercy in their
hearts--flowing, and easily set a-flowing, by such a spectacle as that
bar presented--a man already seeming to belong unto the dead!

In about a quarter of an hour the jury returned to the box--and the
verdict, having been sealed with black wax, was handed up to the Judge,
who read, "We unanimously find the prisoner Guilty." He then stood up to
receive sentence of death. Not a dry eye was in the court during the
Judge's solemn and affecting address to the criminal--except those of
the Shadow on whom had been pronounced the doom. "Your body will be hung
in chains on the moor--on a gibbet erected on the spot where you
murdered the victim of your unhallowed lust, and there will your bones
bleach in the sun, and rattle in the wind, after the insects and the
birds of the air have devoured your flesh; and in all future times, the
spot on which, God-forsaking and God-forsaken, you perpetrated that
double crime, at which all humanity shudders, will be looked on from
afar by the traveller passing through that lonesome wild with a sacred
horror!" Here the voice of the Judge faltered, and he covered his face
with his hands; but the prisoner stood unmoved in figure, and in face
untroubled and when all was closed, was removed from the bar, the same
ghostlike and unearthly phantom, seemingly unconscious of what had
passed, or even of his own existence.

Surely now he will suffer his old father to visit him in his cell! "Once
more only--only once more let me see him before I die!" were his words
to the clergyman of the parish, whose Manse he had so often visited when
a young and happy boy. That servant of Christ had not forsaken him whom
now all the world had forsaken. As free from sin himself as might be
mortal and fallen man--mortal because fallen--he knew from Scripture and
from nature, that in "the lowest deep there is still a lower deep" in
wickedness, into which all of woman born may fall, unless held back by
the arm of the Almighty Being, whom they must serve steadfastly in
holiness and truth. He knew, too, from the same source, that man cannot
sin beyond the reach of God's mercy--if the worst of all imaginable
sinners seek, in a Bible-breathed spirit at last, that mercy through the
Atonement of the Redeemer. Daily--and nightly--he visited that cell;