The Works of George W. M. Reynolds — page 98: what you’re looking at

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

NED RUSSELL 81 It was late on the Thursday night that he met him, and the letter which he bore contained the official pardon, duly signed and sealed by the Minister of the Interior. It would be easier to conceive than to depict the joy which the warm- hearted Don Diego experienced at this triumphant crowning of Kate Marshall’s magnanimous endeavour to save her lover’s life. But the scene now shifts to Barcelona, and it is Friday night. In the principal square a number of men are raising the scaffold by torchlight. A guard.of soldiers, drawn up around, keeps back the approach of the throng of inquisitive observers. The workmen wear masks upon their counte- nances, and the presence of the soldiery is to prevent the lookers-on from drawing so near as to be enabled to recognize any of these individuals so employed, either by their particu- lar clothing, their stature, their voices, or the accidental slipping aside of their masks. In Spain it is considered in- famous for any person to assist in erecting a scaffold for the purpose of a public execution, and it is therefore necessary to raise, as it were, by impressment the requisite workmen for this purpose. It is an act of rebellion on the part of those so impressed to refuse; the authorities, however, adopt pre- cautionary measures, as just now explained, to save them from recognition, so that they may not be thereafter taunted by their companions as “ gallows-builders.”’ Hence the working at night, and the masks upon the countenances of the workers. It was a spectacle of solemn and awful interest, — those men with black crape upon their faces, erecting the scaffold in the midst of the square, in the centre of a cordon of soldiers, the lurid glare of the torches guiding their operations, and throwing forth their forms with a Rembrandt-like effect. So closely were the soldiers marshalled in double ranks that they not merely formed a barrier against the pressure of the crowd without, but likewise a living wall to intercept the - ruddy beams of the torches themselves; but these neverthe- less played upon the bayonets, like lurid lightning on the points of so many conductors. In the iron balconies attached to the houses looking upon the square, crowds of persons — male and female, young and old, the well-born and the rich, the humble and the poor — were gathered to gaze upon the ominous spectacle; or, rather, to catch as much of it as CONnNIEOOOKS (C(O)