But _Venit summa dies et ineluctabile fatum_ (a tag you may be sure the Ordinary rolled off to any broken-down scholar he had in hand); and our felon’s last day dawns. He is taken to the Stone Hall, where his irons are struck off; then he is pinioned by the yeoman of the halter, who performs that service for the moderate fee of five shillings (rope thrown in). At the gate he is delivered over to the Hangman (who is not free of the prison), and by him he is set in the cart (a sorry vehicle drawn by a sorry nag in sorry harness), his coffin oft at his feet, and the Ordinary at his side, and so, amidst the yells of a huge mob and to the sad accompaniment of St. Sepulchre’s bell, the cart moves westward. Almost immediately a halt is called. The road is bounded by the wall of St. Sepulchre’s Churchyard, over the which there peers our vocalist of yester-eve, who takes up his lugubrious whine anew:--“All good people pray heartily with God for the poor sinners who are now going to their death,” with more to the same effect, for all which the poor passenger must once more bless or curse the name of the inconsiderately considerate Dowe. He gave his endowment in 1605, seven years before his death: had some mad turn of fate made him an object of his own charity you had scarce grieved. But now the sexton has done his office to the satisfaction of the beadle of Merchant Tailors’ Hall, who “hath an honest stipend allowed him to see that this is duly done,” and the cart is again under weigh, when, if the principal subject be popular, a lady (you assume her beauty, and you need not rake the rubbish of two centuries for witness against her character) trips down the steps of St. Sepulchre’s Church and presents him with a huge nosegay. If nosegays be not in season, “why, then,” as the conjuror assured Timothy Crabshaw, squire to Sir Launcelot Greaves, “an orange will do as well.” And now the cart rumbles down steep and strait Snow Hill, crosses the Fleet Ditch by narrow Holborn Bridge, creaks up Holborn Hill (the “Heavy Hill,” men named it with sinister twin-meaning), and so through Holborn Bars, whilst the bells, first of St. Andrew’s, Holborn, and then of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, knell sadly as it passes. In the High Street of the ancient village of that name, Halt! is again the word. Of old time a famous Lazar-House stood here, and hard by those elms of St. Giles, already noted as a place of execution. The simple piety of mediæval times would dispatch no wretch on so long a journey without sustenance. Hence at the Lazar-House gate he was given a huge bowl of ale, his “last refreshing in this life,” whereof he might drink at will. The most gallant of the Elizabethans has phrased for us the felon’s thoughts as he quaffed the strange draught. On that chill October morning when Raleigh went to his doom at Westminster, some one handed him “a cup of excellent sack,” courteously inquiring how he liked it? “As the fellow,” he answered with a last touch of