The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 121: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE GUILLOTINE 103 onward to the scaffold erected in the middle of the great square. Nearer and nearer it approaches; more terrible grows the apparatus of death. Oh, it is all a hideous dream, or a reality too fearful to contemplate, — so fearful, indeed, that it is only by questioning its possibility until the very last that the mind is saved from reeling beneath the shock and going mad. The cart stops within a few feet of the steps at the back part of the scaffold. The platform is about ten feet high, lofty enough, therefore, for the entire mass of the populace around to behold the full enactment of the appalling tragedy. In the front part the two black spars tower aloft with an interval of about three feet between them. The ax is sus- pended close up to the cross-beam, and the string which retains it there or lets it fall at pleasure has the end fastened to a peg conveniently placed for the hand of the executioner to reach. A plank, about four feet long, and with one end fastened by a hinge to the platform, is so placed as to serve for binding the victim to it. Two pieces of wood resembling the stocks in which vagrants used to be set in England, but with only one hole, and this intended for the head of the criminal, are fitted between the lower part of the two spars. The uppermost piece of wood, being movable, works in grooves cut into the spars a a short way up, but another groove runs up each spar to the very top, and in these does the ax of the guillotine work. Immediately in front of the place where the criminal’s head is thrust in what may be termed the stocks an immense basket filled with sawdust is put to catch the head and the blood when the gleaming hatchet descends and does its awful work. Such were the dread paraphernalia of death, such the arrangements of the guillotine. All these details were em- braced in a single moment, ay, and comprehended, too, with a horrible clearness, by Mrs. Ranger. She shut her eyes for the first moment following the fearful survey which she thus took, but she was compelled by a dread fascination to open them again and fix them on the object of this appall- ing interest. As for her three companions in crime and pun- ishment, they were now completely stricken down by the presence of death’s ghastly engine, and even Kobolt began to join his accomplices in the mournful lamentations which during the last minute or two they had been putting forth. COMNMIG KS al nin