It is pleasantest, perhaps, to avoid the more familiar and pompous scenes. It is rather in the byplay—in the little vignettes of real life which turn up amidst more serious events—that we may find the characteristic charm of the narrative. The trials, for example, of the regicides have an interest. They died for the most part (Hugh Peters seems to have been an exception) as became the survivors of the terrible Ironsides, glorying, till drums beat under the scaffold to silence them, in their fidelity to the 'good old cause,' and showing a stern front to the jubilant royalists. But one must admit that they show something, too, of the peculiarities which made the race tiresome to their contemporaries as they probably would be to us. They cannot submit without a wrangle—which they know to be futile—over some legal point, where simple submission to the inevitable would have been more dignified; and their dying prayers and orations are echoes of the long-winded sermons of the Blathergowls. They showed fully as much courage, but not so much taste, as the 'royal actor' on the same scene. But amidst the trials there occurs here and there a fragment of picturesque evidence. A waterman tells us how he was walking about Whitehall on the morning of the 'fatal blow.' 'Down came a file of musketeers.' They hurried the hangman into his boat, and said, 'Waterman, away with him; begone quickly.' 'So,' says the waterman, 'out I launched, and having got a little way in the water, says I, "Who the devil have I got in my boat?" Says my fellow, says he, "Why?" I directed my speech to him, saying, "Are you the hangman that cut off the King's head?" "No, as I am a sinner to God," saith he, "not I." He shook, every joint of him. I knew not what to do. I rowed away a little farther, and fell to a new examination of him. "Tell me true," says I, "are you the hangman that hath cut off the King's head? I cannot carry you," said I. "No," saith he;' and explains that his instruments had been used, but not himself; and though the waterman threatened to sink his boat, the supposed hangman stuck to his story, and was presumably landed in safety. The evidence seems to be rather ambiguous as concerns the prisoner, who was accused of being the actual executioner; but the vivacity with which Mr. Abraham Smith tells his story is admirable. Doubtless it had been his favourite anecdote to his fellows and his fares during the intervening years, and he felt, rightly as it has turned out, that this accidental contact with one of the great events of history would be his sole title to a kind of obscure immortality.