d the heavens were
dark above him and the grass of the field an offence. "This is my
father," he said. "I draw my life from him; the flesh upon my bones is
his, the bread I am fed with is the wages of these horrors." He recalled
his mother, and ground his forehead in the earth. He thought of flight,
and where was he to flee to? of other lives, but was there any life
worth living in this den of savage and jeering animals?

The interval before the execution was like a violent dream. He met his
father; he would not look at him, he could not speak to him. It seemed
there was no living creature but must have been swift to recognise that
imminent animosity; but the hide of the Justice-Clerk remained
impenetrable. Had my lord been talkative, the truce could never have
subsisted; but he was by fortune in one of his humours of sour silence;
and under the very guns of his broadside, Archie nursed the enthusiasm
of rebellion. It seemed to him, from the top of his nineteen years'
experience, as if he were marked at birth to be the perpetrator of some
signal action, to set back fallen Mercy, to overthrow the usurping devil
that sat, horned and hoofed, on her throne. Seductive Jacobin figments,
which he had often refuted at the Speculative, swam up in his mind and
startled him as with voices: and he seemed to himself to walk
accompanied by an almost tangible presence of new beliefs and duties.

On the named morning he was at the place of execution. He saw the
fleering rabble, the flinching wretch produced. He looked on for a while
at a certain parody of devotion, which seemed to strip the wretch of his
last claim to manhood. Then followed the brutal instant of extinction,
and the paltry dangling of the remains like a broken jumping-jack. He
had been prepared for something terrible, not for this tragic meanness.
He stood a moment silent, and then--"I denounce this God-defying
murder," he shouted; and his father, if he must have disclaimed the
sentiment, might have owned the stentorian voice with which it was
uttered.

Frank Innes dragged him from the spot. The two handsome lads followed
the same course of study and recreation, and felt a certain mutual
attraction, founded mainly on good looks. It had never gone deep; Frank
was by nature a thin, jeering creature, not truly susceptible whether of
feeling or inspiring friendship; and the relation between the pair was
altogether on the outside, a thing of common knowledge and the
pleas