In cases of treason, the felon was drawn to Tyburn in a sledge tied to a horse’s tail; he was hanged from the cart; but was cut down and dismembered alive. His head went to the adornment of Temple Bar or London Bridge; while his quarters, having been boiled in oil and tar in a cauldron in Jack Ketch’s Kitchen, as the room above the central gateway at Newgate was called, were scattered here and there as the authorities fancied. The complete ritual of disgrace was reserved for political offenders. After rebellions Ketch had his hands full. He would tumble out of his sack good store of heads wherewith he and the Newgate felons made hideous sport, preliminary to parboiling them with bay salt and cummin seed: the one for preservation, the other sovereign against the fowls of the air. If the traitor were a woman, she was burned (till 1790); but usually strangled first. Cases are on record where, with a fire too quick or a Hangman too clumsy, the choking proved abortive and----! The sledge so often supplanted the less ignominious cart, that I ought to explain that a traitor need not be a political offender. Certain coining offences, the murder of a husband by his wife, and of a master by his servant, were all ranked a form of treason, and the criminal was drawn and quartered or burnt accordingly. Two of Tyburn’s officials, the Ordinary and the Hangman, to wit, now claim our attention. The Ordinary, or prison chaplain of Newgate, said “Amen” to the death sentence, and ministered to the convict thence to the end. A terrible duty, to usher your fellow-man from this world into the next! I have heard that one such task near proved fatal to an honest divine; but the hand of little employment hath the daintier sense, and too often the Newgate Ordinary was a callous wretch, with a keen zeal for the profits of his post, and for the rest a mere praying machine. He needs must be good trencherman. It was one of his strange duties to say grace at City banquets. Major Griffiths, who collects so many curious facts in his _Chronicles of Newgate_, alleges him not seldom required to eat three consecutive dinners without quitting the table. In post-Tyburn days, when they hanged in front of the prison, the governor’s daughter used to prepare breakfast for those attending each execution (the _deid clack_, so they called such festivity in Old Scotland). Broiled kidneys were her masterpiece, and she noted that, whilst most of her pale-faced guests could stomach nought save brandy and water, his reverence attacked the dish as one appetised by a prosperous morning’s work. Most Ordinaries are clean gone from memory, unrecorded even by _The Dictionary of National Biography_. One (as fly in amber!) the chance reference of a classic now and again preserves. E’en Guthrie spares half Newgate by a dash,