ules the skies--after having borne more than, as she
meekly said, had ever poor girl borne, she took to her bed quite
heart-broken, and, the night before the day of execution, died. As for
poor little Ann, she had been wiled away some weeks before; and in the
blessed thoughtlessness of childhood, was not without hours of happiness
among her playmates on the braes.

The Morning of that Day arose, and the Moor was all blackened with
people round the tall gibbet, that seemed to have grown, with its horrid
arms, out of the ground during the night. No sound of axes or hammers
had been heard clinking during the dark hours--nothing had been seen
passing along the road; for the windows of all the houses from which
anything could have been seen, had been shut fast against all horrid
sights--and the horses' hoofs and the wheels must have been muffled that
had brought that hideous Framework to the Moor. But there it now
stood--a dreadful Tree! The sun moved higher and higher up the sky, and
all the eyes of that congregation were at once turned towards the east,
for a dull sound, as of rumbling wheels and trampling feet, seemed
shaking the Moor in that direction; and lo! surrounded with armed men on
horseback, and environed with halberds, came on a cart, in which three
persons seemed to be sitting, he in the middle all dressed in white--the
death-clothes of the murderer--the unpitying shedder of most innocent
blood.

There was no bell to toll there--but at the very moment he was ascending
the scaffold, a black cloud knelled thunder, and many hundreds of people
all at once fell down upon their knees. The man in white lifted up his
eyes, and said, "O Lord God of Heaven! and Thou his blessed Son, who
died to save sinners! accept this sacrifice!"

Not one in all that immense crowd could have known that that white
apparition was Ludovic Adamson. His hair, that had been almost
jet-black, was now white as his face--as his figure, dressed, as it
seemed, for the grave. Are they going to execute the murderer in his
shroud? Stone-blind, and stone-deaf, there he stood--yet had he, without
help, walked up the steps of the scaffold. A hymn of several voices
arose--the man of God close beside the criminal, with the Bible in his
uplifted hands; but those bloodless lips had no motion--with him this
world was not, though yet he was in life--in life, and no more! And was
this the man who, a few months ago, flinging the fear of death from him,
as a