, and fancy ran riot over the ghastly
fact. For him no hope, no rest, no peace, no touch of hands gentler
than the hangman's; all the world is after him like a roaring prairie
of flame! I thought of Doolan, weary, foot-sore, heart-sore, entering
some quiet village of an evening; and to quench his thirst, going up to
the public well, around which the gossips are talking, and hearing that
they were talking of _him_; and seeing from the well itself IT glaring
upon him, as if conscious of his presence, with a hundred eyes of
vengeance. I thought of him asleep in out-houses, and starting up in
wild dreams of the policeman's hand upon his shoulder fifty times ere
morning. He had committed the crime of Cain, and the weird of Cain he
had to endure. But yesterday innocent, how unimportant; to-day
bloody-handed, the whole world is talking of him, and everything he
touches, the very bed he sleeps on, steals from him his secret, and is
eager to betray!

Doolan was finally captured in Liverpool, and in the Spring Assize the
three men were brought to trial. The jury found them guilty, but
recommended Hickie to mercy on account of some supposed weakness of
mind on his part. Sentence was, of course, pronounced with the usual
solemnities. They were set apart to die; and when snug abed o'
nights--for imagination is most mightily moved by contrast--I crept
into their desolate hearts, and tasted a misery which was not my own.
As already said, Hickie was recommended to mercy, and the
recommendation was ultimately in the proper quarter given effect to.

The evening before the execution has arrived, and the reader has now to
imagine the early May sunset falling pleasantly on the outskirts of the
city. The houses looking out upon an open square or space, have little
plots of garden-ground in their fronts, in which mahogany-coloured
wall-flowers and mealy auriculas are growing. The side of this square,
along which the City Road stretches northward, is occupied by a
blind-asylum, a brick building, the bricks painted red and picked out
with white, after the tidy English fashion, and a high white cemetery
wall, over which peers the spire of the Gothic Cathedral; and beyond
that, on the other side of the ravine, rising out of the populous city
of the dead, a stone John Knox looks down on the Cathedral, a Bible
clutched in his outstretched and menacing hand. On all this the May
sunset is striking, dressing everything in its warm, pleasan