n. Thus alternately intimidated by the deep
tones and stern denunciations of the father, encouraged by the specious
reasonings of the daughter, or soothed by her resistless fascinations;
assured, too, by the headsman, that for some years sentences of
decapitation, with rare exceptions, had been commuted for the galleys,
his power to contend with his tempter abandoned him: he dropped, like
the fascinated bird, into the jaws of the serpent; and, yielding to
his destiny, he commenced his training in a vocation from which every
feeling in his nature, and every dictate of his understanding, recoiled
with abhorrence.

It was no sacrifice, to one of his timid and fastidious habits, to
abandon a world in which he had ever found himself an alien, and which
he now thought confederated to persecute and destroy him. He submitted
in uncomplaining resignation to his fate, and ere long found relief in
the growing attachment of the headsman and his daughter. His pure and
affectionate heart, and the undeviating rectitude of his principles
and conduct, soon won the entire esteem of the old man, whose better
feelings had not been blunted by his official duties; while the
light-hearted and bewitching Madelon, who now loved almost to idolatry a
man so incomparably superior to any she had hitherto known, delighted to
cheer his hours of sadness, and watched his every wish with intense and
unwearied solicitude. Meanwhile, the old man had quietly made every
requisite preparation, and a month after the assent of Florian to his
proposal, the lovers were united. The official appointment of Florian,
as adopted successor to the headsman, took place some days before the
marriage, and it was stipulated by the town authorities that, on the
next ensuing condemnation of a criminal to death, he should prove on the
scaffold his competency to succeed the executioner.

For many months after this appointment, every arrival of a criminal in
the town prison struck terror into the heart of Florian. Happily,
however, the assertion of the headsman that it was a growing practice
of the judicial authorities to substitute the galleys for decapitation,
was verified by the fact, and Florian enjoyed several years of domestic
happiness, disturbed only by apprehensions which he could never subdue,
that sooner or later the evil he so much dreaded would certainly befall
him. Meanwhile his beloved Madelon had made him the happy father
of three promising boys, and he began t