upon his
arm, and beckoned him away. He gazed stupidly about him for an
instant, and obeyed.

They led him through a paved room under the court, where some prisoners
were waiting till their turns came, and others were talking to their
friends, who crowded round a grate which looked into the open yard.
There was nobody there to speak to _him_; but, as he passed, the
prisoners fell back to render him more visible to the people who were
clinging to the bars: and they assailed him with opprobrious names,
and screeched and hissed. He shook his fist, and would have spat upon
them; but his conductors hurried him on, through a gloomy passage
lighted by a few dim lamps, into the interior of the prison.

Here, he was searched, that he might not have about him the means of
anticipating the law; this ceremony performed, they led him to one of
the condemned cells, and left him there--alone.

He sat down on a stone bench opposite the door, which served for seat
and bedstead; and casting his blood-shot eyes upon the ground, tried to
collect his thoughts. After awhile, he began to remember a few
disjointed fragments of what the judge had said: though it had seemed
to him, at the time, that he could not hear a word. These gradually
fell into their proper places, and by degrees suggested more: so that
in a little time he had the whole, almost as it was delivered. To be
hanged by the neck, till he was dead--that was the end. To be hanged
by the neck till he was dead.

As it came on very dark, he began to think of all the men he had known
who had died upon the scaffold; some of them through his means. They
rose up, in such quick succession, that he could hardly count them. He
had seen some of them die,--and had joked too, because they died with
prayers upon their lips. With what a rattling noise the drop went
down; and how suddenly they changed, from strong and vigorous men to
dangling heaps of clothes!

Some of them might have inhabited that very cell--sat upon that very
spot. It was very dark; why didn't they bring a light? The cell had
been built for many years. Scores of men must have passed their last
hours there. It was like sitting in a vault strewn with dead
bodies--the cap, the noose, the pinioned arms, the faces that he knew,
even beneath that hideous veil.--Light, light!

At length, when his hands were raw with beating against the heavy door
and walls, two men appeared: one bearing a candle, which he thrus