The dismissal of Arnulph, his chief aide-de-camp, had left the headsman short-handed, and in vain he sought some one to supply his place; so that after having, for very many years, put his hand to no instrument of punishment save the broad short sword, the chief emblem of his office, he suddenly found himself compelled to descend to lower functions, and to break a murderer on the wheel. At this execution a rare incident occurred, showing another of the _Scharfrichter’s_ privileges. The culprit was bound upon the grating, and Benz dealt him the first blow, upon the shin. The bone snapped, and the unhappy victim, a man of gigantic frame and strength, maddened by extremity of agony, wrenched out the cramp-iron to which his right wrist was bound, and extended his arm to ward off the coming blow. Thereupon a forward young man stepped thoughtlessly out of the crowd, seized the criminal’s arm and drew it back, whilst one of the executioner’s assistants again drove in the iron. Then the headsman laid down his wheel, stepped up to the imprudent youth, clapped his hand upon his shoulder and said, “Now art thou mine till thy day of death.” Voluntary aid given to the executioner entailed perpetual servitude, inevitable and infamous. In this instance, the volunteer, by trade a turner from Nuremberg, and who was also a professional pugilist, was compelled, in spite of prayers and repugnance, to, strip his jerkin and assist in the horrible execution then going forward, after which he mournfully accompanied his new mates to the executioner’s dwelling. House and home, his honest name, and a loving and expectant bride, were all for ever lost to him by this one rash act. And the only hope he dared indulge was, that his family and friends might never learn his fate, but deem him dead in distant parts. The cruel severity with which Master Benz enforced his privilege was requited to him by his pressed recruit, who found undue favour in the eyes of Grethel. The Nuremberger, however, absorbed in grief, took little heed of the lady’s amorous advances; and she, incensed by his indifference, applied to old Blutrude for a love-philter. All this forms a part of the romantic plot which is made the vehicle for exhibiting the public and private existence of the headsman of the middle ages, and we need but briefly touch upon it. The Nuremberg Joseph drank the potion, which reminded him, by its exhilarating effects, of “the foaming, reaming drink he had once tasted at his master’s wedding at Namur, in Brabant, and which the Walloons fetch from the county of Champagne, in France, to thin their blood, clogged by thick barley beer.” Soon, however, the young man repented of deceiving Benz, who was kind to him after his rough fashion; and one morning that the headsman called him to his room, to eat a savoury pottage his wife had prepared, but for which he himself felt little appetite, Veit (the Nuremberger) thought the