In the room to which the condemned lords were conducted after sentence, refreshment was served to them, previous to their removal to the Tower. When this had nearly come to an end, Balmerino, ever self-possessed, proposed that they ‘might have t’other bottle,’ for, said he, alluding to their being now condemned to separate cells: ‘We shall never meet again till――’ and here he pointed to his neck. Kilmarnock was more depressed than Cromartie. Balmerino did not greatly encourage him by showing how he should lay his head. He bade him ‘not wince, lest the stroke should cut his skull or his shoulders, and advised him to bite his lips.’ In some of the idle half-hours in Court, during adjournments, Balmerino had played with the tassels of the axe, and affected to try its edge with his finger. His good humour towards it did not last. On this eventful day, after he had gone into his coach, the symbolic weapon was rather carelessly flung in, before the gentleman-gaoler himself took his seat. ‘Take care!’ cried Balmerino to that official, ‘or you will break my shins with that damned axe!’ However, he recovered his good humour by the time he arrived at Charing Cross, where he stopped the coach at a fruit stall, that he might buy ‘honeyblobs,’ as the Scotch call gooseberries. Balmerino had lost his playful indifference for the gaoler’s weapon. He observed, with a grim expression, that, as the Lord High Steward proceeded with his address, the gentleman-gaoler gradually turned the edge of the axe towards the condemned peers. On entering the Tower, he thought no more of himself. ‘I am extremely afraid,’ he said, ‘that Lord Kilmarnock will not behave well!’ [Sidenote: _GEORGE SELWYN._] George Selwyn, of course, contrived to get a dreary joke out of the solemnity. He saw plain and meagre Mrs. Christopher Bethel, her sharp hatchet visage looking wistfully towards the rebel lords. ‘What a shame it is,’ said Selwyn, ‘to turn her face to the prisoners till they are condemned!’ Selwyn, who was fond of keeping memorials of capital trials and executions at which he was present, begged Sir William Saunderson to get him the High Steward’s wand, after it was broken, when the trials were over. When that time came, Selwyn had no longer a fancy for the fragments. Lord Hardwicke, he said, behaved so like an attorney the first day, and so like a pettifogger the second, that he wouldn’t take it to light his fire with. Walpole gives an illustration of the foreign idea which found expression in the hall, in which he seems to have discerned some wit, which might escape the detection of less acute personages. One foreign ambassador, addressing another, said, ‘Vraiment, cela est auguste.’ ‘Oui,’ replied the other, ‘mais cela n’est pas royal!’ [Sidenote: _KILMARNOCK’S PRINCIPLES._]