reat carts.

He felt dazed and blind, yet with a kind of lightness too as he came
out of the gaol-gate into that packed mass of faces, held back by guards
from the open space where the horse and the hurdle waited. A dozen
persons or so were within the guards; he knew several of them by sight;
two or three were magistrates; another was an officer; two were
ministers with their Bibles.

It is hard to say whether he were afraid. Fear was there, indeed--he
knew well enough that in his case, at any rate, the execution would be
done as the law ordered; that he would be cut down before he had time to
die, and that the butchery would be done on him while he would still be
conscious of it. Death, too, was fearful, in any case.... Yet there were
so many other things to occupy him--there was the exhilarating knowledge
that he was to die for his faith and nothing else; for they had offered
him his life if he would go to church; and they had proved nothing as to
any complicity of his in any plot, and how could they, since there was
none? There was the pain of his tormented body to occupy him; a pain
that had passed from the acute localized agonies of snapped sinews and
wrenched joints into one vast physical misery that soaked his whole body
as in a flood; a pain that never ceased; of which he dreamed darkly, as
a hungry man dreams of food which he cannot eat, to which he awoke again
twenty times a night as to a companion nearer to him than the thoughts
with which he attempted to distract himself. This pain, at least, would
have an end presently. Again, there was an intermittent curiosity as to
how and what would befall his flying soul when the butchery was done.
"To sup in Heaven" was a phrase used by one of his predecessors on the
threshold of death.... For what did that stand?... And at other times
there had been no curiosity, but an acquiescence in old childish images.
Heaven at such times appeared to him as a summer garden, with pavilions,
and running water and the song of birds ... a garden where he would lie
at ease at last from his torn body and that feverish mind, which was all
that his pain had left to him; where Mary went, gracious and motherly,
with her virgins about her; where the Crucified Lamb of God would talk
with him as a man talks with his friend, and allow him to lie at the
Pierced Feet ... where the glory of God rested like eternal sunlight on
all that was there; on the River of Life, and the wood of the trees th