"As the warmth of the cheerful day began to shed itself upon the scanty crowd the murmur of tongues was heard, shutters were thrown open, the blinds drawn up, and those who had slept in rooms over against the prison, where places to see the execution were let at high prices, rose hastily from their beds. In some of the houses people were busy taking out the window-sashes for the better accommodation of the spectators; in others, the spectators were already seated, and beguiling the time with cards, or drink, or jokes among themselves. Some had purchased seats upon the housetops, and were already crawling to their stations from parapet and garret window. Some were yet bargaining for good places, and stood in them in a state of indecision, gazing at the slowly-swelling crowd, and at the workmen as they rested listlessly against the scaffold--affecting to listen with indifference to the proprietor's eulogy of the commanding view his house afforded, and the surpassing cheapness of his terms. "A fairer morning never shone. From the roofs and the upper stories of the buildings the spires of the city churches and the great cathedral dome were visible, rising up beyond the prison into the blue sky, and clad in the color of light summer clouds, and showing in the clear atmosphere their every scrap of tracery and fretwork, and every niche and loophole. All was lightness, brightness and promise, excepting in the street below, into which (for it lay yet in the shadow) the eye looked down into a dark trench, where, in the midst of so much life and hope and renewal of existence, stood the terrible instrument of death. It seemed as if the very sun forbore to look upon it. "But it was better, grim and sombre in the shade, than when, the day being more advanced, it stood confessed in full glare and glory of the sun, with its black paint blistering and its nooses dangling in the light like loathsome garlands. It was better in the solitude and gloom of midnight, with a few forms clustering about it, than in the freshness and the stir of the morning, the centre of an eager crowd. It was better haunting the street like a spectre, when men were in their beds, and influencing, perchance, the city's dreams, than braving the broad day, and thrusting its obscene presence upon the waking senses.