“The man who is about to suffer has been convicted upon the clearest evidence of a most dastardly and cold-blooded murder. The circumstances which led to his discovery are a little singular; and, indeed, I might say romantic.” “So a neighbour of mine was saying,” observed Peace. “I am not acquainted with all the particulars.” His companion gave a succinct but graphic account of all those facts with which the reader is already acquainted. “How very singular!――how remarkable!” exclaimed Peace, adjusting his spectacles when his companion had ceased. A short thick-set man, with dark piercing eyes, a close-cut grey beard, now appeared on the scaffold, at which he took a hasty glance. This figure presented a weird-like appearance. “There he is!” said several voices. “Who is that?” said Peace. “Calcraft, the hangman,” answered his companion. “Oh, indeed. What has he come for?” “To see that the arrangements are made in a satisfactory manner. He has made one or two mistakes lately, and I think the old man is getting a little narvess.” [Sidenote: No. 4.] [Illustration: PEACE ESCAPES FROM THE POLICE, AND SEEKS SHELTER IN A YOUNG GIRL’S BEDROOM.] It was quite true that Calcraft had had one or two mishaps; but these, it is said, were attributable to circumstances for which he was in no way responsible. He certainly fulfilled the duties of public executioner creditably for nearly fifty years, during which period he made use of what is known as the “short drop.” His successor, Marwood, advocates and makes use of the “long drop,” and many have affirmed that his mode for putting criminals to death is the most merciful of the two; but when doctors (I mean hangmen) differ, who shall decide? Calcraft has now retired. He is seventy-nine years of age, and was, when I last saw him, in tolerably good-health for a man of his years. The name of the gibbet’s victims have been legion; for until a very recent period our penal code was most severe. We have hanged not only the murderer, the ravisher, and the incendiary――not only the burglar, the highwayman, and the forger, but the sheep-stealer, the petty thief who purloined a roll of cloth or a loaf of bread from a shop-counter. If any nation ought to know how to hang, it should assuredly be the English. Decapitation has been a mode of death reserved for aristocratic culprits, although in the “Halifax gibbet” and the Scottish “Maiden” some faint resemblance to the guillotine may be traced. But we have always obstinately refused to employ the machine, adapted from the mediæval types by the benevolent French physician, and have stuck manfully to the gallows. Formerly the convict doomed to the “triple tree” used to be flung off a ladder. Then we grew more humane, and made him stand with a noose round his neck in a cart, which was drawn from under him at a given signal.