Boom! boom! The deep solemn sound penetrated each court and alley of the ancient city, and struck awe to the hearts even of the most hardened; boom! boom! the swelling tones startled the boatmen on the Exe, awoke the echoes of the hills around the fair city of the west, nay reached the rich purple moorland, and startled the children who played amongst the heather or gathered whortle-berries. And beneath the two grand old towers in front of the great west door of the historical fane, was erected that disgrace to the civilization of our forefathers, the scaffold with its gibbet and quartering block, its hideous butchering apparatus, in the very cathedral yard. What a multitude had now assembled! men, women, boys, girls; the noble and the simple, the burgher and the vagrant; there were many stalwart country men too from Dartmoor, each wearing a sprig of heather in his hat, that his companions might recognise him. “_Here they come!_” The bell booms out faster and faster, the multitude stretch their necks to gaze and catch the first glimpse of the sufferers. Oh, what a strange, morbid interest clings to those about to die; the very fact that that body framed by God as His noblest work, and sanctified by being limb for limb the same as the Incarnate Son took as His own, the very fact that that body is to be so ruthlessly desecrated, causes this awful excitement, this panting, breathless interest, in the poor victims. Forward they come, between two lines of halberdiers; how calm and resigned they look as they approach the scaffold. The litany of the dying with its perpetual response--_Ora pro eis_ (pray for them)--addressed in turn to each saint and angel of the calendar, is now audible. The multitude catch up the strain and join in the response; now it is _Miserere Domine_, now again _Ora pro eis_; but it is no longer one feeble voice, but the breath of a multitude which bears the sweet sad refrain to heaven. They are close to the fatal spot, and first the youth, then the old man ascends the steps, clad in white, for such was their choice, in testimony of their innocence of all crime before men. The fair attractive face of the younger sufferer, so sad, yet resigned, that it seems of itself a petition for pity, the reverend face of the senior, like to that of some holy patriarch or prophet, so soon too to be dabbled in blood and stuck up on rusty nails over the Guild hall in the High Street; truly this is piteous, and the gentler portion of the spectators can hardly forbear weeping as they still cry _Miserere_ or _Ora pro eis_, while the _cannibals_ who are there smack their lips at the dainty sight prepared for them.