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Updated: June 4, 2025
It is well to parenthesize here, that of the fatal accidents in the Sperm-Whale Fishery, this kind is perhaps almost as frequent as any. Sometimes, nothing is injured but the man who is thus annihilated; oftener the boat's bow is knocked off, or the thigh-board, on which the headsman stands, is torn from its place and accompanies the body.
She said, It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that the headsman raised his hand to smite off his head when behold, loud cries arose and the folk closed their shops; whereupon the King said to the headsman, "Wait awhile," and despatched one to learn the news.
Too late, too late! There was no longer any power of utterance there. Once or twice there was a twitching of the eyelids over the stiffening staring eyes, till at last they closed painfully in the dream of death. And above the condemned sinner towered the form of the avenger of sin the headsman.
It would seem that the Sieur Colis would fain take a maiden to wife in the public sports, and, when her birth came to be be known, that his bride was no other than the child of Balthazar, the common headsman of Berne!" A general silence betrayed the embarrassment of most of the listeners.
It was a cold, gray morning, and Sir Walter was kept standing on the scaffold while the headsman ground his ax, the delay being for the amusement and edification of the Christian friends assembled. "One thing I will never do," said Oliver Cromwell, law-clerk, swart and lusty, in green stockings and other sartor-resartus trifles; "one thing I will never do and that is, take human life!"
Some seven or eight onlookers stood by way of an audience, awaiting a drama composed of the strokes of chance, the faces of the actors, the circulation of coin, and the motion of the croupier's rake, much as a silent, motionless crowd watches the headsman in the Place de Greve.
When the end comes there is nothing to do but let her renounce all earthly passion and face the headsman as a purified saint. So far as she is concerned, there is no action at all, but only the dramatic development of a situation. For, after all, the expedients just spoken of do not hit the mark exactly, in the sense of making the heroine responsible for her own fate.
At the sound of the rapidly retreating hoofs the headsman thought to himself: "That was Heaven's own gracious messenger." The headsman's young wife, however, sighed: "Ah! that was a gay gentleman." But the 'prentice growled furiously: "It was old Nick himself."
The headsman, the recreant knight, and all who had assisted willingly at the execution, were struck to the ground, becoming black masses of cinder, by a flash of fearful lightning; and then the people learned and acknowledged that right and justice were on the Champion's side.
Such was the horror at the sentence, that the headsman stole secretly away from Winchester to avoid performing his office, and for four long hours of the 13th of March, 1329, did Earl Edmund Plantagenet stand on the scaffold above the castle gate, waiting till some one could be found to put him to death, in the name of his own nephew and by the will of his mother's niece.
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