copy, by the unfeeling, from his benevolent brothers of the bench. In the present judge, tenderness was not designed for the culprit's consolation, but for the approbation of the auditors.
There were no spectators, Hannah, by your side when last he parted from you—if there had, the awful William had been awed to marks of pity.
Stunned with the enchantment of that well-known tongue directed to her, she stood like one just petrified—all vital power was suspended.
Again he put the question, and with these additional sentences, tenderly and emphatically delivered—"Recollect yourself—Have you no witnesses? No proof in your behalf?"
A dead silence followed these questions.
He then mildly, but forcibly, added—"What have you to say?"

Here, a flood of tears burst from her eyes, which she fixed earnestly upon him, as if pleading for mercy, while she faintly articulated,
"Nothing, my Lord."
After a short pause, he asked her, in the same forcible but benevolent tone
"Have you no one to speak for your character?"
The prisoner answered,
"No."
A second gush of tears followed this reply, for she called to mind by whom, her character had first been blasted.
He summed up the evidence—and every time he was compelled to press hard upon the proofs against her, she shrunk, and seemed to stagger with the deadly blow—writhed under the weight of his minute justice, more than from the prospect of a shameful death.
The jury consulted but a few minutes—the verdict was—
"Guilty."
She heard it with composure.
But when William placed the fatal velvet on his head, and rose to pronounce

her sentence—she started with a kind of convulsive motion—retreated a step or two back, and lifting up her hands, with a scream exclaimed—
"Oh! not from you!"
The piercing shriek which accompanied these words, prevented their being heard by part of the audience; and those who heard them, thought little of their meaning, more, than that they expressed her fear of dying.
Serene, and dignified, as if no such exclamation had been uttered, William delivered the fatal speech, ending with—"Dead, dead, dead."
She fainted as he closed the period, and was carried back to prison in a swoon; while he adjourned the court to go to dinner.


IF, unaffected by the scene he had witnessed, William sat down to dinner with an appetite, let not the reader conceive, that the most distant idea had struck his mind—of his ever having seen, much less familiarly known,