hich this
assault had thrown him, his hardihood was gone; and he was reconveyed
to the cell, in which he was destined agonisingly to struggle out his
last hideous and distorted hours, in a state of abject horror which
cannot be described. He who felt nothing, knew nothing, had now his
eyes opened with terrible clearness to one object--the livid phantasma
of a strangling death. All the rest was convulsive despair and
darkness. Thought shudders at it--but let me go on.

The worthy clergyman, whose particular duty it was to smooth and
soften, and, if possible, illuminate the last dark hours of the dying
wretch, was not unwilling to admit the voluntary aid of those whom
religious predispositions and natural commiseration excited to share
with him in the work of piety. The task was in truth a hard one. The
poor wretch, for the sake of the excitement which such intercourse
naturally afforded him, and which momentarily relieved his sick and
fainting spirit, groaned out half-articulate expressions of
acquiescence in the appeals that were made to him; but the relief was
physical merely. The grasp of the friendly hand made waver for a
moment the heavy shadow of death which hung upon him--and he grasped
it. The voice breathing mercy and comfort in his ear, stilled for a
second the horrid echo of doom--and he listened to it. It was as the
drowning man gasps at the bubble of air which he draws down with him
in sinking--or as a few drops of rain to him at the stake, around whom
the fire is kindled and hot. This, alas! we saw not as we ought to
have done; but when the sinking wretch, at the word "mercy," laid his
head upon our shoulder and groaned, we, sanguine in enthusiasm,
deemed it deep repentance. When his brow seemed smooth for a space at
the sound of eternal life, we thought him as "a brand snatched from
the burning." In the forward pride (for pride it was) of human
perfectibility, we took him--him the murderer--as it were under our
tutelage and protection. We prayed with him, we read to him, we
watched with him, we blessed his miserable sleeps, and met his more
wretched awakings. In the presumption of our pity, we would cleanse
that white, in the world's eye, which God had, for inscrutable
purposes, ordained should seem to the last murky as hell. We would
paint visibly upon him the outward and visible sign of sin washed
away, and mercy found. That that intended triumph may not have helped
to add or to retain one feather's wei