the others captured him.

Disarmed after a desperate struggle, he was loaded with chains and
carried to Edinburgh, where he was starved for three days, and then
hanged without the formality of a trial on a gibbet, thirty feet
high, set up in the Grassmarket. Even then Scotland's vengeance was
unsatisfied. The body, cut down from its first gibbet, was hung in
chains forty feet above Leith Walk, where it creaked and gibbered as a
warning to evildoers for half a century, until at last the inhabitants
of that respectable quarter petitioned that Gilderoy's bones should
cease to rattle, and that they should enjoy the peace impossible for his
jingling skeleton.

Gilderoy was no drawing-room scoundrel, no villain of schoolgirl
romance. He felt remorse as little as he felt fear, and there was no
crime from whose commission he shrank. Before his death he confessed to
thirty-seven murders, and bragged that he had long since lost count of
his robberies and rapes. Something must be abated for boastfulness. But
after all deduction there remains a tale of crime that is unsurpassed.
His most admirably artistic quality is his complete consistence. He was
a ruffian finished and rotund; he made no concession, he betrayed no
weakness. Though he never preached a sermon against the human race, he
practised a brutality which might have proceeded from a gospel of hate.
He spared neither friends nor relatives, and he murdered his own mother
with as light a heart as he sent a strange widow of Aberdeen to her
death. His skill is undoubted, and he proved by the discipline of his
band that he was not without some talent of generalship. But he owed
much of his success to his physical strength, and to the temperament,
which never knew the scandal of hesitancy or dread.

A born marauder, he devoted his life to his trade; and, despite his
travels in France and Spain, he enjoyed few intervals of merriment.
Even the humour, which proved his redemption, was as dour and grim as
Scotland can furnish at her grimmes: and dourest. Here is a specimen
will serve as well as another: three of Gilderoy's gang had been
hanged according to the sentence of a certain Lord of Session, and
the Chieftain, for his own vengeance and the intimidation of justice,
resolved upon an exemplary punishment. He waylaid the Lord of Session,
emptied his pockets, killed his horses, broke his coach in pieces,
and having bound his lackeys, drowned them in a pond. This was but the
prel