grave interest; and stood with his hands resting on the slab of

wood before him, so composedly, that they had not displaced a leaf

of the herbs with which it was strewn. The court was all bestrewn

with herbs and sprinkled with vinegar, as a precaution against

gaol air and gaol fever.

Over the prisoner’s head there was a mirror, to throw the light

down upon him. Crowds of the wicked and the wretched had been

reflected in it, and had passed from its surface and this earth’s

together. Haunted in a most ghastly manner that abominable

place would have been, if the glass could ever have rendered back

its reflections, as the ocean is one day to give up its dead. Some

passing thought of the infamy and disgrace for which it had been

reserved, may have struck the prisoner’s mind. Be that as it may, a

change in his position making him conscious of a bar of light

across his face, he looked up; and when he saw the glass his face

flushed, and his right hand pushed the herbs away.

It happened that the action turned his face to that side of the

court which was on his left. About on a level with his eyes, there

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sat, in that corner of the Judge’s bench, two persons upon whom

his look immediately rested; so immediately, and so much to the

changing of his aspect, that all the eyes that were turned upon

him, turned to them.

The spectators saw in the two figures, a young lady of little

more than twenty, and a gentleman who was evidently her father;

a man of a very remarkable appearance in respect of the absolute

whiteness of his hair, and a certain indescribable intensity of face:

not of an active kind, but pondering and self-communing. When

this expression was upon him, he looked as if he were old; but

when it was stirred and broken upas it was now, in a moment,

on his speaking to his daughterhe became a handsome man, not

past the prime of life.

His daughter had one of her hands drawn through his arm, as

she sat by him, and the other pressed upon it. She had drawn

close to him, in her dread of the scene, and in her pity for the

prisoner. Her forehead had been strikingly expressive of an

engrossing terror and compassion that saw nothing but the peril of

the accused. This had been so very noticeable, so very powerfully

and naturally shown, that starers who had had no pity for him

were touched by her; and the whisper went about, “Who are

they?”

Jerry, the messenger, who had made his own observations, in

his own manner, and who had been sucking the rust off his fingers

in his absorption, stretched his neck to hear who they were. The

crowd about him had pressed and passed the inquiry on to the

nearest attendant, and from him it had been more slowly pressed

and passed back; at last it got to Jerry:

“Witnesses.”

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“For which side?”