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He became a shield above the fallen; he stood between the soldier, condemned for the sleep of exhaustion, and the hangman's noose. He refused to attend a cabinet meeting because he was trying to find a reason for reprieving a soldier.

Cross-examining failed to get the statement from the woman that would justify my reprieving or pardoning him. I cannot even seem to dishonor the proceedings of the courts of the State and, boy, I'm just plain up against it. Here we are at my own side door. Good night, and make a lightning toilet if you want to get to that pie on time. Good night, again!"

There was a scream from the women, and the prisoner dropped to the ground as if he had been actually struck. Fitzjames spoke as if he were present at the crime, and uttering the feelings roused by the ferocious treatment of a helpless woman. Some of his letters record his sense of painful responsibility when the question arose as to reprieving a prisoner.

"A Vestal can't use her prerogative of reprieving criminals," said Brinnaria, "unless she encounters by accident a criminal being led to execution. She can't lay in wait for one. Any suspicion of collusion vitiates her privilege. The encounter must be unforeseen."

But no utterance takes higher rank, or deserves more consideration in its appeal to sanity, justice, and humanity, than the declaration of certain ministers and laymen of Connecticut, in giving their advice and "reasons" for a cessation of the prosecutions for witchcraft in the colonial courts, and for reprieving Mercy Disborough under sentence of death.

But everybody was, for the moment, stark-mad on the subject of Porteous, and engaged busily in attacking or defending the measures of Government in reprieving him; and the ardour of dispute had excited such universal thirst, that half the young lawyers and writers, together with their very clerks, the class whom Butler was looking after, had adjourned the debate to some favourite tavern.

"Alas! my poor girl," said the Duke; "you have made a long and a sad journey to very little purpose Your sister is ordered for execution." "But I am given to understand that there is law for reprieving her, if it is in the king's pleasure," said Jeanie. "Certainly, there is," said the Duke; "but that is purely in the king's breast.

There was a good deal of hanging in those days; and yet the authorities had an ugly way of reprieving condemned men on whom the sight-seers had been counting.

What powerful influence induced the Prefect to risk the odium of reprieving a prisoner whose guilt was so satisfactorily ascertained as that of Ulpius never was disclosed. Some declared that the city magistrate was still at heart a Pagan, and that he consequently shrunk from authorising the death of a man who had once been the most illustrious among the professors of the ancient creed.

The precautions taken were drastic, skilfully organized, and far-reaching, and his agents kept him advised of the danger that continually beset him. Even though he had no thought of reprieving the Duc, and deliberately allowed him to be shot, the act of self-preservation, extreme though it may appear, can hardly be termed, under the circumstances, unwarranted.