his whiskers, and offering 100 pounds as reward for his apprehension, or for such information as would lead to his apprehension—­like a silent, implacable bloodhound following close on the track of the murderer.  This terrible broadsheet I read, was certain that he had read it also, and fancy ran riot over the ghastly fact.  For him no hope, no rest, no peace, no touch of hands gentler than the hangman’s; all the world is after him like a roaring prairie of flame!  I thought of Doolan, weary, foot-sore, heart-sore, entering some quiet village of an evening; and to quench his thirst, going up to the public well, around which the gossips are talking, and hearing that they were talking of him; and seeing from the well itself IT glaring upon him, as if conscious of his presence, with a hundred eyes of vengeance.  I thought of him asleep in out-houses, and starting up in wild dreams of the policeman’s hand upon his shoulder fifty times ere morning.  He had committed the crime of Cain, and the weird of Cain he had to endure.  But yesterday innocent, how unimportant; to-day bloody-handed, the whole world is talking of him, and everything he touches, the very bed he sleeps on, steals from him his secret, and is eager to betray!

Doolan was finally captured in Liverpool, and in the Spring Assize the three men were brought to trial.  The jury found them guilty, but recommended Hickie to mercy on account of some supposed weakness of mind on his part.  Sentence was, of course, pronounced with the usual solemnities.  They were set apart to die; and when snug abed o’ nights—­for imagination is most mightily moved by contrast—­I crept into their desolate hearts, and tasted a misery which was not my own.  As already said, Hickie was recommended to mercy, and the recommendation was ultimately in the proper quarter given effect to.

The evening before the execution has arrived, and the reader has now to imagine the early May sunset falling pleasantly on the outskirts of the city.  The houses looking out upon an open square or space, have little plots of garden-ground in their fronts, in which mahogany-coloured wall-flowers and mealy auriculas are growing.  The side of this square, along which the City Road stretches northward, is occupied by a blind-asylum, a brick building, the bricks painted red and picked out with white, after the tidy English fashion, and a high white cemetery wall, over which peers the spire of the Gothic Cathedral; and beyond that, on the other side of the ravine, rising out of the populous city of the dead, a stone John Knox looks down on the Cathedral, a Bible clutched in his outstretched and menacing hand.  On all this the May sunset is striking, dressing everything in its warm, pleasant pink, lingering in the tufts of foliage that nestle around the asylum, and dipping the building itself one half in light, one half in tender shade.  This open space or square is an excellent place for the games of us boys, and “Prisoner’s Base” is being carried out with as much earnestness as the business of life now by those of us who are left.  The girls, too, have their games of a quiet kind, which we held in huge scorn and contempt.  In two files, linked arm-in-arm, they alternately dance towards each other and then retire, singing the while, in their clear, girlish treble, verses, the meaning and pertinence of which time has worn away—­