The day of execution was the day of his supreme triumph.  As some men are artists in their lives, so the Deacon was an artist in his death.  Nothing became him so well as his manner of leaving the world.  There is never a blot upon this exquisite performance.  It is superb, impeccable!  Again his dandyism supported him, and he played the part of a dying man in a full suit of black, his hair, as always, dressed and powdered.  The day before he had been jovial and sparkling.  He had chanted all his flash songs, and cracked the jokes of a man of fashion.  But he set out for the gallows with a firm step and a rigorous demeanour.  He offered a prayer of his own composing, and ‘O Lord,’ he said, ’I lament that I know so little of Thee.’  The patronage and the confession are alike characteristic.  As he drew near the scaffold, the model of which he had given to his native city a few years since, he stepped with an agile briskness; he examined the halter, destined for his neck, with an impartial curiosity.

His last pleasantry was uttered as he ascended the table.  ‘George,’ he muttered, ‘you are first in hand,’ and thereafter he took farewell of his friends.  Only one word of petulance escaped his lips:  when the halters were found too short, his contempt for slovenly workmanship urged him to protest, and to demand a punishment for the executioner.  Again ascending the table, he assured himself against further mishap by arranging the rope with his own hands.  Thus he was turned off in a brilliant assembly.  The Provost and Magistrates, in respect for his dandyism, were resplendent in their robes of office, and though the crowd of spectators rivalled that which paid a tardy honour to Jonathan Wild, no one was hurt save the customary policeman.  Such was the dignified end of a ‘double life.’  And the duplicity is the stranger, because the real Deacon was not Brodie the Cracksman, but Brodie the Gentleman.  So lightly did he esteem life that he tossed it from him in a careless impulse.  So little did he fear death that, ‘What is hanging?’ he asked.  ‘A leap in the dark.’

II—­CHARLES PEACE

Charles peace, after the habit of his kind, was born of scrupulously honest parents.  The son of a religious file-maker, he owed to his father not only his singular piety but his love of edged tools.  As he never encountered an iron bar whose scission baffled him, so there never was a fire-eating Methodist to whose ministrations he would not turn a repentant ear.  After a handy portico and a rich booty he loved nothing so well as a soul-stirring discourse.  Not even his precious fiddle occupied a larger space in his heart than that devotion which the ignorant have termed hypocrisy.  Wherefore his career was no less suitable to his ambition than his inglorious end.  For he lived the king of housebreakers, and he died a warning to all evildoers, with a prayer of intercession trembling upon his lips.