in its gripe.  It was one of the tortures of the Inquisition she was suffering, and she could not stir from her place.  Then, in her great anguish, she, too, cast her eyes upon that dying figure, and, looking upon its pierced hands and feet and side and lacerated forehead, she felt that she also must suffer uncomplaining.  In the moment of her sharpest pain she did not forget the duties of her under office, but dried the dying man’s moist forehead with her handkerchief, even while the dews of agony were glistening on her own.  How long this lasted she never could tell.  Time and thirst are two things you and I talk about; but the victims whom holy men and righteous judges used to stretch on their engines knew better what they meant than you or I!—­What is that great bucket of water for? said the Marchioness de Brinvilliers, before she was placed on the rack.—­For you to drink,—­said the torturer to the little woman.—­She could not think that it would take such a flood to quench the fire in her and so keep her alive for her confession.  The torturer knew better than she.

After a time not to be counted in minutes, as the clock measures, —­without any warning,—­there came a swift change of his features; his face turned white, as the waters whiten when a sudden breath passes over their still surface; the muscles instantly relaxed, and Iris, released at once from her care for the sufferer and from his unconscious grasp, fell senseless, with a feeble cry,—­the only utterance of her long agony.

Perhaps you sometimes wander in through the iron gates of the Copp’s Hill burial-ground.  You love to stroll round among the graves that crowd each other in the thickly peopled soil of that breezy summit.  You love to lean on the freestone slab which lies over the bones of the Mathers,—­to read the epitaph of stout William Clark, “Despiser of Sorry Persons and little Actions,”—­to stand by the stone grave of sturdy Daniel Malcolm and look upon the splintered slab that tells the old rebel’s story,—­to kneel by the triple stone that says how the three Worthylakes, father, mother, and young daughter, died on the same day and lie buried there; a mystery; the subject of a moving ballad, by the late Benjamin Franklin, as may be seen in his autobiography, which will explain the secret of the triple gravestone; though the old philosopher has made a mistake, unless the stone is wrong.

Not very far from that you will find a fair mound, of dimensions fit to hold a well-grown man.  I will not tell you the inscription upon the stone which stands at its head; for I do not wish you to be sure of the resting-place of one who could not bear to think that he should be known as a cripple among the dead, after being pointed at so long among the living.  There is one sign, it is true, by which, if you have been a sagacious reader of these papers, you will at once know it; but I fear you read carelessly, and must study them more diligently before you will detect the hint to which I allude.