All night long were the workmen busily employed in erecting the gloomy scaffold: the sound of their hammers and saws fell upon the ear at intervals; these again were drowned by the loud jeers and coarse jests which were ever and anon uttered and responded to by many in that brutal mob. One after another the huge pieces of black wood were brought out and fitted together, until high above the crowd rose the grim stage on which the death-ending drama was to be represented. Even on the countenances of those who erected the pile no expression of pity could be traced; they hammered and sawed as if they were erecting a gay mansion for the living, instead of a place on which the doomed victim was a few moments to plant his feet, look around him, and—die! The posts, which supported the planks on which so many trembling actors had trod, were fitted into the same holes in the ground—foundations which had been dug long years ago, and stood firmly, with all their load of sorrow and crime, through scores of heart-aching executions: spots which the thoughtful man never passes without heaving a sigh, and where the brutal and the vicious only congregate to jest at degraded humanity.
Ranged along the lines of the barriers, like hounds that are ever in foremost at the death, are seen those whom neither rain, snow, storm, nor darkness ever prevented from attending an execution. Their conversation is about their companions of former years—of those who were long ago imprisoned, transported, or hanged; while they alone, though often within the clutches of the law, are still at large, with all their crimes. Some of these, whose hair age and guilt have whitened, remember the days when men were hung up in a row—can tell who died basely and who bravely; and on his memory who met death in sorrow and repentance they cast reproach and shame; while he who plunged daringly into the darkness of eternity, as if he gloried in his iniquity, they hold up as an example to be followed. No rocking nor swaying of the crowd from without can remove these old idolaters of the gallows: the mass of human bodies behind may roll to and fro, like the waves of the ocean—the motion affects them not; they are anchored like rocks at the foot of the gloomy headland, which stands with its dark beam reared high above the billowy multitude. Nearly every countenance along those foremost ranks seems marked with the lines which witnessing such public executions have imprinted there—as if the very cordage had
left its twisted impress upon their visages, and the dark beam its ominous line upon their furrowed brows, giving to them the very reflex of the gallows itself, while watching its workings.