I forbear to depict my sensations upon the gallows; although here, undoubtedly, I could speak to the point, and it is a topic upon which nothing has been well said.  In fact, to write upon such a theme it is necessary to have been hanged.  Every author should confine himself to matters of experience.  Thus Mark Antony composed a treatise upon getting drunk.

I may just mention, however, that die I did not.  My body was, but I had no breath to be, suspended; and but for the knot under my left ear (which had the feel of a military stock) I dare say that I should have experienced very little inconvenience.  As for the jerk given to my neck upon the falling of the drop, it merely proved a corrective to the twist afforded me by the fat gentleman in the coach.

For good reasons, however, I did my best to give the crowd the worth of their trouble.  My convulsions were said to be extraordinary.  My spasms it would have been difficult to beat.  The populace encored.  Several gentlemen swooned; and a multitude of ladies were carried home in hysterics.  Pinxit availed himself of the opportunity to retouch, from a sketch taken upon the spot, his admirable painting of the “Marsyas flayed alive.”

When I had afforded sufficient amusement, it was thought proper to remove my body from the gallows; —­ this the more especially as the real culprit had in the meantime been retaken and recognized, a fact which I was so unlucky as not to know.

Much sympathy was, of course, exercised in my behalf, and as no one made claim to my corpse, it was ordered that I should be interred in a public vault.

Here, after due interval, I was deposited.  The sexton departed, and I was left alone.  A line of Marston’s “Malcontent"-

Death’s a good fellow and keeps open house —­ struck me at that moment as a palpable lie.

I knocked off, however, the lid of my coffin, and stepped out.  The place was dreadfully dreary and damp, and I became troubled with ennui.  By way of amusement, I felt my way among the numerous coffins ranged in order around.  I lifted them down, one by one, and breaking open their lids, busied myself in speculations about the mortality within.

“This,” I soliloquized, tumbling over a carcass, puffy, bloated, and rotund —­ “this has been, no doubt, in every sense of the word, an unhappy —­ an unfortunate man.  It has been his terrible lot not to walk but to waddle —­ to pass through life not like a human being, but like an elephant —­ not like a man, but like a rhinoceros.

“His attempts at getting on have been mere abortions, and his circumgyratory proceedings a palpable failure.  Taking a step forward, it has been his misfortune to take two toward the right, and three toward the left.  His studies have been confined to the poetry of Crabbe.  He can have no idea of the wonder of a pirouette.  To him a pas de papillon has been an abstract conception.  He has never ascended