ckest wall pierced through,--steep ramparts have been
scaled before now,--and you might one day burst your yoke and be again
let loose upon society, like an infuriated beast, marking your passage
with murder and destruction; for none would be safe from your Herculean
strength, or from the sharpness of your knife; therefore such
consequences must be avoided. But since the galleys might fail to stop
your infamous career, how is society to be preserved from your brutal
violence? The scaffold comes next in consideration--"

"It is my life, then, you seek!" cried the ruffian. "My life! Oh, spare
it!"

"Peace, coward! Hope not that I mean so speedy a termination to your
just punishment. No; your eager craving after a wretched existence would
prevent you from suffering the agony of anticipated death, and, far from
dwelling upon the scaffold and the block, your guilty soul would be
filled with schemes of escape and hopes of pardon; neither would you
believe you were truly doomed to die till in the very grasp of the
executioner; and even in that terrible moment it is probable that,
brutalised by terror, you would be a mere mass of human flesh, offered
up by justice as an expiatory offering to the manes of your victims.
That mode of settling your long and heavy accounts will not half pay the
debt. No; poor, wretched, trembling craven! we must devise a more
terrific method of atonement for you. At the scaffold, I repeat, you
would cling to hope while one breath remained within you; wretch that
you are, you would dare to hope! you, who have denied all hope and mercy
to so many unhappy beings! No, no! unless you repent, and that with all
your heart, for the misdeeds of your infamous life, I would (in this
world, at least) shut out from you the faintest glimmer of hope--"

"What man is this? What have I ever done to injure _him_?--whence comes
he thus to torture me?--where am I?" asked the Schoolmaster, in almost
incoherent tones, and nearly frantic with terror.

Rodolph continued:

"If even you could meet death with a man's courage, I would not have you
ascend the scaffold; for you it would be merely the arena in which, like
many others, you would make a disgusting display of hardened ferocity;
or, dying as you have lived, exhale your last sigh with an impious scoff
or profane blasphemy. That must not be permitted. It is a bad example to
set before a gazing crowd the spectacle of a condemned being making
sport of the instrument