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Among his treasures above his bed, was the city executioner's sword, much notched. This sword was six feet long, with a huge handle, to be grasped with two hands, and with an iron ornamented knob as counterpoise at the end of the handle. How life is made up of lost opportunities!
When the executioner's assistants drew near to support him he once more refused their help, and again set himself in motion, advancing with short steps, but as quickly and as straightly as the rope hampering his legs permitted. All at once Guillaume felt that Salvat's eyes were fixed upon him.
"My limbs feel so light, now that my irons are removed," he observed with a smile, "that I am half inclined to dance." "You'll dance upon nothing, presently," rejoined Jonathan, brutally. "Farewell for ever," said Jack, extending his hand to Mrs. Marvel. "Farewell!" blubbered the executioner's wife, pressing his hand to her lips. "Here are a pair of gloves and a nosegay for you. Oh dear! oh dear!
All men, at least, who speak the English tongue, will accept the conclusion of the provinces, that when laws which protected the citizen against arbitrary imprisonment and guaranteed him a trial in his own province which forbade the appointment of foreigners to high office which secured the property of the citizen from taxation, except by the representative body which forbade intermeddling on the part of the sovereign with the conscience of the subject in religious matters when such laws had been subverted by blood tribunals, where drowsy judges sentenced thousands to stake and scaffold without a hearing by excommunication, confiscation, banishment-by hanging, beheading, burning, to such enormous extent and with such terrible monotony that the executioner's sword came to be looked upon as the only symbol of justice then surely it might be said, without exaggeration, that the complaints of the Netherlanders were "no pedantic fantasies," and that the King had ceased to perform his functions as dispenser of God's justice.
No other words were spoken by the condemned men, for at this moment one of the Arrabbiati, a personal enemy of Savonarola, breaking through the hedge of guards around the scaffold, snatched the torch from the executioner's hand and himself set fire to the four corners of the pile.
These Calvaires are of rough wood, usually eight or ten feet high; sometimes with the cross are the dread implements of Christ's pain the crown of thorns, the hammer and nails, the executioner's ladder, the Roman soldier's spear. Often at the foot is a box for alms to help the forgotten dead who are in purgatory. As the habitant passes them he usually lifts his hat.
It is the Executioner's right. One woman he can claim as his during his term of office one only, and for his wife. Duke Otho, I call upon you to allow it! Chancellor Texel, I call upon you to read the law! I have it here in my hand. Head! Read! I will save my soul! I will save my soul!"
He had just, it seems, mingled a little business with pleasure; for noticing, as he passed, a woman tied by the hands to be punished for some offence, the nature of which I did not learn, he took the executioner's duty on himself, fired at her, and killed her outright.
He came to say farewell; he had his own nest to feather, and could do a more profitable business in the lowlands than up here in the forest. Finally he offered Adam his property at a very low price. The smith had smiled at the jockey's proposal, still he went to the Richtberg the very next day to see the place. There stood the executioner's house, from which the whole street was probably named.
Every time this noise is made, it must disturb a hundred people who are applying their minds to business of some sort, no matter how trivial it may be; while on the thinker its effect is woeful and disastrous, cutting his thoughts asunder, much as the executioner's axe severs the head from the body.
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