ning.

The day passed off. Day? There was no day. It was gone as soon as come;
and night came on again--night so long, and yet so short; long in its
dreadful silence, and short in its fleeting hours. At one time he raved
and blasphemed, and at another howled and tore his hair. Venerable men
of his own persuasion had come to pray beside him, but he had driven
them away with curses. They renewed their charitable efforts, and he
beat them off.

Saturday night. He had only one night more to live. And as he thought
of this the day broke--Sunday.

It was not until the night of this last awful day that a withering sense
of his helpless, desperate state came in its full intensity upon his
blighted soul; not that he had ever held any defined or positive hope
of mercy, but that he had never been able to consider more than the dim
probability of dying so soon. He had spoken little to either two men,
who relieved each other in their attendance upon him; and they, for
their parts, made no effort to rouse his attention. He had sat there
awake, but dreaming. Now, he started up every minute, and with gasping
mouth and burning skin, hurried to and fro in such a paroxysm of fear
and wrath that even they--used to such sights--recoiled from him with
horror. He grew so terrible, at last, in all the tortures of his evil
conscience, that one man could not bear to sit there, eyeing him alone,
and so the two kept watch together.

He cowed down upon his stone bed, and thought of the past. He had been
wounded with some missiles from the crowd on the day of his capture,
and his head was bandaged with a linen cloth. His red hair hung down
upon his bloodless face; his beard was torn, and twisted into knots; his
eyes shone with a terrible light; his unwashed flesh crackled with the
fever that burnt him up. Eight--nine--ten. If it was not a trick to
frighten him, and those were the real hours treading on each other's
heels, where would he be, when they came round again? Eleven! Another
struck, before the voice of the previous hour had ceased to vibrate. At
eight he would be the only mourner in his own funeral train; at eleven--

Those dreadful walls of Newgate, which have hidden so much misery and
such unspeakable anguish, not only from the eyes, but, too often and too
long, from the thoughts of men, never held so dread a spectacle as that.
The few who lingered as they passed, and wondered what the man was doing
who was to be hung to-morrow, woul