"

"What did the fellow do?--yell?"

"Oh no--it's the work of an instant. They put a man inside a frame and
a sort of broad knife falls by machinery--they call the thing a
guillotine-it falls with fearful force and weight-the head springs
off so quickly that you can't wink your eye in between. But all the
preparations are so dreadful. When they announce the sentence, you know,
and prepare the criminal and tie his hands, and cart him off to the
scaffold--that's the fearful part of the business. The people all crowd
round--even women-though they don't at all approve of women looking on."

"No, it's not a thing for women."

"Of course not--of course not!--bah! The criminal was a fine intelligent
fearless man; Le Gros was his name; and I may tell you--believe it or
not, as you like--that when that man stepped upon the scaffold he _cried_,
he did indeed,--he was as white as a bit of paper. Isn't it a dreadful
idea that he should have cried--cried! Whoever heard of a grown man
crying from fear--not a child, but a man who never had cried before--a
grown man of forty-five years. Imagine what must have been going on in
that man's mind at such a moment; what dreadful convulsions his whole
spirit must have endured; it is an outrage on the soul that's what it
is. Because it is said 'thou shalt not kill,' is he to be killed because
he murdered some one else? No, it is not right, it's an impossible
theory. I assure you, I saw the sight a month ago and it's dancing
before my eyes to this moment. I dream of it, often."

The prince had grown animated as he spoke, and a tinge of colour
suffused his pale face, though his way of talking was as quiet as ever.
The servant followed his words with sympathetic interest. Clearly he
was not at all anxious to bring the conversation to an end. Who knows?
Perhaps he too was a man of imagination and with some capacity for
thought.

"Well, at all events it is a good thing that there's no pain when the
poor fellow's head flies off," he remarked.

"Do you know, though," cried the prince warmly, "you made that remark
now, and everyone says the same thing, and the machine is designed with
the purpose of avoiding pain, this guillotine I mean; but a thought came
into my head then: what if it be a bad plan after all? You may laugh at
my idea, perhaps--but I could not help its occurring to me all the same.
Now with the rack and tortures and so on--you suffer terrible pain of
course; but then your tort