"It was not until the night of this last awful day, that a withering sense of his helpless, desperate state came in its full intensity upon his blighted soul; not that he had ever held any defined or positive hope of mercy, but that he had never been able to consider more than dim probability of dying so soon. He had spoken little to either of the two men, who relieved each other in attendance upon him; and they, for their parts, made no efforts to arouse his attention. He sat there, awake, but dreaming. Now he started up, every minute, and with gasping mouth and burning skin, hurried to and fro in such a paroxysm of fear and wrath that even they--used to such sights--recoiled from him with horror. He grew so terrible, at last, in all the tortures of his evil conscience that one man could not bear to sit there, eyeing him alone; and so the two kept watch together. "He cowered down upon his stone bed, and thought of the past. He had been wounded with some missiles from the crowd on the day of his capture, and his head was bandaged with a linen cloth. His red hair hung down upon his bloodless face; his beard was torn and twisted into knots; his eyes shone with a terrible light; his unwashed flesh crackled with the fever that burnt him up. Eight--nine--ten. If it was not a trick to frighten him, and those were the real hours treading on each other's heels, where would he be, when they came around again? Eleven! Another struck, before the voice of the previous hour had ceased to vibrate. At eight, he would be the only mourner in his own funeral train; at eleven---- "Those dreadful walls of Newgate, which had hidden so much misery and unspeakable anguish, not only from the eyes, but, too often and too long, from the thoughts, of men, never held so dreaded a spectre as that. The few who lingered as they passed, and wondered what the man was doing, who was to be hung to-morrow, would have slept but ill that night if they could have but seen him. "From early in the evening until nearly midnight, little groups of two and three presented themselves at the lodge-gate, and inquired, with anxious faces, whether any reprieve had been received. These being answered in the negative, communicated the welcome intelligence to the clusters in the street, who pointed out to one another the door from which he must come out, and showed where the scaffold would be built, and, walking with unwilling steps away, turned back to conjure up the scene. By degrees they fell off, one by one; and for an hour in the dead of the night, the street was left to solitude and darkness." When Mr. Brownlow and Oliver appeared at the wicket, and presented an order of admission to the prisoner, signed by one of the Sheriffs, they were immediately admitted to the lodge.