to your request.”  Even then I felt a singular joy at hearing this, though I had no longer any expectation of release.  Death was, I thought, far too near at hand for that.  Just then a soldier approached us, and led me, bare-headed, to the tree trunk, where he placed me with my back against it, and made fast my hands behind me with a rope to the iron ring.  No bandage was put over my eyes.  I stood thus, facing the file of soldiers in the middle of the quadrangle, and noticed that the officer with the drawn sabre placed himself at the extremity of the line, composed of six men.  In that supreme moment I also noticed that their uniform was bright with steel accoutrements.  Their helmets were of steel, and their carbines, as they raised them and pointed them at me, ready cocked, glittered in a fitful gleam of sunlight with the same burnished metal.  There was an instant’s stillness and hush while the men took aim; then I saw the officer raise his bared sabre as the signal to fire.  It flashed in the air; then, with a suddenness impossible to convey, the whole quadrangle blazed with an awful light,—­a light so vivid, so intense, so blinding, so indescribable that everything was blotted out and devoured by it.  It crossed my brain with instantaneous conviction that this amazing glare was the physical effect of being shot, and that the bullets had pierced my brain or heart, and caused this frightful sense of all-pervading flame.  Vaguely I remembered having read or having been told that such was the result produced on the nervous system of a victim to death from firearms.  “It is over,” I said, “that was the bullets.”  But presently there forced itself on my dazed senses a sound—­a confusion of sounds—­darkness succeeding the white flash—­then steadying itself into gloomy daylight; a tumult; a heap of stricken, tumbled men lying stone-still before me; a fearful horror upon every living face; and then . . . it all burst on me with distinct conviction.  The storm which had been gathering all the morning had culminated in its blackest and most electric point immediately overhead.  The file of soldiers appointed to shoot us stood exactly under it.  Sparkling with bright steel on head and breast and carbines, they stood shoulder to shoulder, a complete lightning conductor, and at the end of the chain they formed, their officer, at the critical moment, raised his shining, naked blade towards the sky.  Instantaneously heaven opened, and the lightning fell, attracted by the burnished steel.  From blade to carbine, from helmet to breastplate it ran, smiting every man dead as he stood.