The jury were not disposed to retire.  After communing a few minutes together, one of them stood up and delivered the verdict:  it was Guilty! The judge assumed the crowning badge of the judicial potentate—­the black cap; and the clerk of arraigns asked the prisoner at the bar, in the usual form, if he had anything to urge why sentence of death should not be passed upon him.

Poor Harvey!  I durst scarcely look at him.  As the sonorous words fell on his ear, he was grasping nervously with shaking hands at the front of the dock.  He appeared stunned, bewildered, as a man but half-awakened from a hideous dream might be supposed to look.  He had comprehended, though he had scarcely heard, the verdict; for on the instant, the voice which but a few years before sang to him by the brook side, was ringing through his brain, and he could recognize the little pattering feet of his children, as, sobbing and clinging to their shrieking mother’s dress, she and they were hurried out of court The clerk, after a painful pause, repeated the solemn formula.  By a strong effort the doomed man mastered his agitation; his pale countenance lighted up with indignant fire, and firm and self-possessed, he thus replied to the fearful interrogatory:—­

“Much could I say in the name, not of mercy, but of justice, why the sentence about to be passed on me should not be pronounced; but nothing, alas! that will avail me with you, pride-blinded ministers of death.  You fashion to yourselves—­out of your own vain conceits do you fashion—­modes and instruments, by the aid of which you fondly imagine to invest yourselves with attributes which belong only to Omniscience; and now I warn you—­and it is a voice from the tomb, in whose shadow I already stand, which addresses you—­that you are about to commit a most cruel and deliberate murder.”

He paused, and the jury looked into each other’s eyes for the courage they could not find in their own hearts.  The voice of conscience spoke, but was only for a few moments audible.  The suggestions that what grave parliaments, learned judges, and all classes of “respectability” sanctioned, could not be wrong, much less murderous or cruel, silenced the “still, small” tones, and tranquilized the startled jurors.

“Prisoner at the bar,” said the judge with his cold, calm voice of destiny, “I cannot listen to such observations:  you have been found guilty of a heinous offence by a jury of your countrymen after a patient trial.  With that finding I need scarcely say I entirely agree.  I am as satisfied of your guilt as if I had seen you commit the act with my own bodily eyes.  The circumstance of your being a person who, from habits and education, should have been above committing so base a crime, only aggravates your guilt.  However, no matter who or what you have been, you must expiate your offence on the scaffold.  The law has very properly, for the safety of society, decreed the punishment of death for such crimes:  our only and plain duty is to execute that law.”