f torture. He could feel that his feet were being handled, but
it appeared as if nothing touched his flesh. He gave a great sighing
moan as his arms were drawn back over his head; and the sweat poured
again from all over his body.

Then, as the cords tightened:

"As Thy arms, O Christ, were extended ..." he whispered.

CHAPTER IX

I

A great murmuring crowd filled every flat spot of ground and pavement
and parapet. They stood even on the balustrade of St. Mary's Bridge;
there were fringes of them against the sky on the edges of roofs a
quarter of a mile away. No flat surface was to be seen anywhere except
on the broad reach of the river, and near the head of the bridge, in the
circular space, ringed by steel caps and pike-points, where the gallows
and ladder rose. Close beside them a column of black smoke rose heavily
into the morning air, bellying away into the clear air. A continual
steady low murmur of talking went up continually.

* * * * *

There had been no hanging within the memory of any that had roused such
interest. Derbyshire men had been hung often enough; a criminal usually
had a dozen friends at least in the crowd to whom he shouted from the
ladder. Seminary priests had been executed often enough now to have
destroyed the novelty of it for the mob; why, three had been done to
death here little more than two months ago in this very place. They gave
no sport, certainly; they died too quietly; and what peculiar interest
there was in it lay in the contemplation of the fact that it was for
religion that they died. Gentlemen, too, had been hanged here now and
then--polished persons, dressed in their best, who took off their outer
clothes carefully, and in one or two cases had handed them to a servant;
gentlemen with whom the sheriff shook hands before the end, who eyed the
mob imperturbably or affected even not to be aware of the presence of
the vulgar. But this hanging was sublime.

First, he was a Derbyshire man, a seminary priest and a gentleman--three
points. Yet this was no more than the groundwork of his surpassing
interest. For, next, he had been racked beyond belief. It was for three
days before his sentence that Mr. Topcliffe himself had dealt with him.
(Yes, Mr. Topcliffe was the tall man that had his rooms in the
market-place, and always went abroad with two servants.... He was to
have Padley, too, it was said, as a reward for all his zeal.) Of course,