on their fatal purpose, had adopted a means of forcing
entrance equally desperate and certain.

The sudden glare of light suggested to the stupified and astonished
object of popular hatred the possibility of concealment or escape. To
rush to the chimney, to ascend it at the risk of suffocation, were the
only means which seemed to have occurred to him; but his progress was
speedily stopped by one of those iron gratings, which are, for the sake
of security, usually placed across the vents of buildings designed for
imprisonment. The bars, however, which impeded his farther progress,
served to support him in the situation which he had gained, and he seized
them with the tenacious grasp of one who esteemed himself clinging to his
last hope of existence. The lurid light which had filled the apartment,
lowered and died away; the sound of shouts was heard within the walls,
and on the narrow and winding stair, which, eased within one of the
turrets, gave access to the upper apartments of the prison. The huzza of
the rioters was answered by a shout wild and desperate as their own, the
cry, namely, of the imprisoned felons, who, expecting to be liberated in
the general confusion, welcomed the mob as their deliverers. By some of
these the apartment of Porteous was pointed out to his enemies. The
obstacle of the lock and bolts was soon overcome, and from his hiding
place the unfortunate man heard his enemies search every corner of the
apartment, with oaths and maledictions, which would but shock the reader
if we recorded them, but which served to prove, could it have admitted of
doubt, the settled purpose of soul with which they sought his
destruction.

A place of concealment so obvious to suspicion and scrutiny as that which
Porteous had chosen, could not long screen him from detection. He was
dragged from his lurking-place, with a violence which seemed to argue an
intention to put him to death on the spot. More than one weapon was
directed towards him, when one of the rioters, the same whose female
disguise had been particularly noticed by Butler, interfered in an
authoritative tone. "Are ye mad?" he said, "or would ye execute an act of
justice as if it were a crime and a cruelty? This sacrifice will lose
half its savour if we do not offer it at the very horns of the altar. We
will have him die where a murderer should die, on the common gibbet--We
will have him die where he spilled the blood of so many innocents!"

A loud shout