The Steam-Packet: A Tale of the River and the Ocean — page 127: what you’re looking at

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

94 THE STEAM PACKET, say not that one life is nothing in the great chain of creation -—the doom of one miserable being, who had never done a good action in his life, and who had hitherto dragged on a grovelling existence un- noticed and unknown, had caused the neighbouring towns and villages to pour forth their crowds, had set the men of justice and the men of the sword to work, and had collected all together 1 in one point on this fatal morning! No insult was offered to the prisoner as he passed slowly along the passage opened for him by the crowd ;—but if there were no public de- monstration calculated to wound him, there was also an absence of any kind sympathy tending to cheer him. A deep, a stern, a solemn, a religious silence was maintained by the multitude, as the maiefactor, attended by the two priests, dragged himself to the foot of the guillo- tine. Atthat moment the executioner, attended by his two assistants, appeared upon the scaffold. He lowered the axe, tried its edge, and then greased the grooves, in which it worked up and down, with apiece of candle. The gendarmes helped the condemned one up the steps to the platform: his face was colourless, and upon it could death impress no more hideous expression, nor throw a more ashy pallor than it already wore. His legs almost refused to perform their office ; his hands were clasped together, in bitter—bitter agony of mind ;— but his eyeballs seemed dead and lustreless, although his brain was at that moment the seat of such appalling—such withering—such light- ning-blasting thoughts ! Oh! who may say what agomies were experienced by that young man during the few moments he stood upon the platform of the guil- lotine, while the executioner’s assistants bound him to the fatal plank ? Who shall decide whether that short interval of ineffable horror were not meet expiation for even the dread crime of which he had been guilty? Oh! too dread subject for contemplation, if mortal have ex- ceeded the trust reposed in him, and flown in the face of his Maker by taking away, even under the semblance and sanction of human justice, the lives of those who are created in that Maker’s image! The dread preparations were completed ;—the criminal was bound | powerless to a plank, which was then lowered to a horizontal position, and shoved onward until the head of the miserable man fitted into a hollow in a block of wood, perpendicularly placed beneath the hatchet. Another block of wood, also with a semicircular hollowing, was drawn down above his neck, so that his head was now fixed in a hole resem- bling those of the stocks. The priests leant forward to whisper the last consolation of man in the malefactor’s ears, and, all being ready, the executioner pulled a strmg which let the fatal axe ‘Tose. Down— (E(0) Gomichbooks —