He was to be a terror no more. A cup, the inseparable amethystine cup, stood on the table beside his couch. He lay writhing in pain. His countenance wore the ghastliest hue of death. I bade him surrender. He smiled, took the cup in his trembling hand, and eagerly swallowed the remaining drops in its bottom. “What! poison!” exclaimed my companion; “has the villain escaped me? Here is my planet again; never was man so unlucky. But he is not dead yet.” He drew his falchion, and lifted it up with the look of one about to offer a solemn sacrifice. I seized his arm. “He is dying,” said I; “he is beyond earthly vengeance.” The wretched criminal before us was nearly insensible to his brief preservation. The poison, acting upon a frame already broken with public and private anxieties, was making quick work, and the glazed eye, the fallen countenance, and the collapsed limb showed that his last hour was come. [Sidenote: The Death-Bed of Gessius Florus] “And this is the thing,” soliloquized the son of El Hakim, “that men feared! In this senseless flesh was the power to make the free tremble for their freedom, and the slave curse the hour that he was born. This mass of mortality could stand between me and happiness—could make me a beggar, a wanderer, miserable, mad!” He caught up the hand that hung nerveless from the couch. “Accursed hand!” exclaimed he, “what torrents of blood have owed their flowing to thee! A word written by these fingers cost a thousand lives. And, O Heaven! in this cruel grasp was the key of thy dungeon, my Mary!—that dungeon of more than the body, the hideous prison-house that extinguished thy mind!” He let fall the hand and wept bitterly. To my utter surprise the procurator started upon his feet, and with the look that had so often made the heart quake, haughtily demanded who we were, and how we dared to interrupt his privacy? I felt as if a spirit had started up before me from the shroud. But this extraordinary revival was merely the last effort of a fierce mind. He tottered, and was falling, when my companion darted forward, grasped him by the bosom with one hand, and waving the falchion above him with the other—