“I am none,” said the unfortunate Porteous:  “that which you charge upon me fell out in self-defence, in the lawful exercise of my duty.”

“Away with him—­away with him!” was the general cry.  “Why do you trifle away time in making a gallows?—­that dyester’s pole is good enough for the homicide.”

The unhappy man was forced to his fate with remorseless rapidity.  Butler, separated from him by the press, escaped the last horrors of his struggles.  Unnoticed by those who had hitherto detained him as a prisoner, he fled from the fatal spot, without much caring in what direction his course lay.  A loud shout proclaimed the stern delight with which the agents of this deed regarded its completion.  Butler, then, at the opening into the low street called the Cowgate, cast back a terrified glance, and, by the red and dusky light of the torches, he could discern a figure wavering and struggling as it hung suspended above the heads of the multitude, and could even observe men striking at it with their Lochaberaxes and partisans.  The sight was of a nature to double his horror, and to add wings to his flight.

SCOTT.

* * * * *

MAZEPPA.

       “’Bring forth the horse!’—­the horse was brought;
          In truth, he was a noble steed,
          A Tartar of the Ukraine breed,
       Who look’d as though the speed of thought
       Were in his limbs; but he was wild,
          Wild as the wild deer, and untaught,
       With spur and bridle undefiled—­
          ’T was but a day he had been caught;
       And snorting, with erected mane,
       And struggling fiercely, but in vain,
       In the full foam of wrath and dread
       To me the desert-born was led: 
       They bound me on, that menial throng;
       Upon his back with many a thong;
       Then loosed him with a sudden lash—­
       Away!—­away!—­and on we dash! 
       Torrents less rapid and less rash.

* * * * *

       “Away, away, my steed and I,
          Upon the pinions of the wind,
          All human dwellings left behind;
       We sped like meteors through the sky,
       When with its crackling sound the night
       Is chequer’d with the northern light: 
       Town—­village—­none were on our track. 
          But a wild plain of far extent,
       And bounded by a forest black;
          And, save the scarce seen battlement
       On distant heights of some stronghold,
       Against the Tartars built of old,
       No trace of man.  The year before
       A Turkish army had march’d o’er;
       And where the Spahi’s hoof hath trod,
       The verdure flies the bloody sod: 
       The sky was dull, and dim, and gray,
          And a low breeze crept moaning by—­
          I could have answered with a sigh—­