From the expression of such countenances we can see that the exhibition they are awaiting has for them no terrors; that it is but calculated to harden their hearts, by making them more familiar with the image of death; and that, instead of repenting, they are more likely to go and take away life; thus following the example which the law itself has set before their eyes. Here and there, mingled among the crowd, are seen the figures of women; some, whose countenances are marked with dissipation, yet bearing faint traces of former beauty, as if Nature was still reluctant to obliterate the fair image which she had first formed, though every trace of the pure spirit, which had once given it such light and animation, has long since perished. If they speak together in tones of pity, it is the besotted sympathy of maudlin inebriety. There is a rocking of the head, a swaying of the body, and a folding of the arms, which tell how low they have sunk,--that the once clear intellect is prostrated before the power of ardent spirits; while the crushed bonnet, the dirty shawl, the gown fastened with a single hook upon the back, and that slip-shod slovenliness of the feet, proclaim that all the pride of the woman has vanished. Girls and youths, too, are there, on whose countenances the impress of innocence is still stamped, though the white purity of the flower is sullied with the trail of the slimy soil in which it has grown. It makes the heart ache--while looking upon these stained and drooping flowers, that are growing amid such a wilderness of full-blown weeds--to reflect upon the deathly blight which must at last settle down and destroy them, unless they are transplanted by some kind and nurturing hand into a more favourable soil. Surely that law which can take away life might throw its protecting power over such as these, and a score or two of policemen be stationed to prevent them from witnessing such a scene as an execution, which is only calculated to brutalise their youthful minds. Pocket-picking, fighting, drunkenness, and profanity in almost every form, are the only examples to be picked up by these young frequenters of the gallows. No man can venture there with a kind and feeling heart, unless impelled by such motives as would lead him to plunge into a pest-house in the hope of restoring again to health some of those whom the plague has stricken down. They think not of the heart-broken relatives who have taken a last farewell as they stood within the massy and low-vaulted corridors behind that forbidding and impassable barrier of iron bars--nor of the condemned cell in which the doomed prisoner has passed so many hours of bitter remorse, looking with an inward eye of awe into that mysterious future into which he is now to be suddenly launched.