With eager joy the prisoners embraced each other, praising, and thanking God, not only that they were to suffer for Jesus, but also that they were to suffer on a cross like Jesus; and then, robed in their best attire, they set off for the place of execution in palanquins which the guards had provided for the purpose. The Giffiaques walked at their side. Jane, the mother of Simon, besought the executioner to bind her limbs as tightly as possible, that she might thus share the anguish which the nails inflicted upon those of Jesus; and she spoke from her cross with so much force and eloquence, that the presiding officer, fearing the effects of her words upon the people, had her stabbed, without waiting for the rest of the victims. Luis and Magdalen were tied up next. They bound the child so violently that he could not refrain from shrieking; but when they asked him if he was afraid to die, he said he was not; and so they took and set him up directly opposite his mother. For a brief interval the martyr and her adopted child gazed silently on each other; then, summoning all her strength, she said, "Son, we are going to heaven: take courage, and cry, 'Jesus, Mary!' with your latest breath." And again the child replied, as he had done before when, on leaving their own home, she had made him a similar exhortation, "Mother, you shall be obeyed!" The executioner struck at him first, but missed his aim; and more than ever fearing for his constancy, Magdalen exhorted him from her cross, while Michael, standing at its foot, spoke words of comfort to him. But the child needed not their urging; he did not shriek again, nor did he shrink, but waited patiently until a second blow had pierced him through and through; and the lance, yet reeking with his blood, was directly afterwards plunged into the heart of his mother, whose sharpest pang had probably already passed on the instant when the son of her love expired before her. And now the fair and youthful Agnes alone remained, kneeling, as when she first had reached the place of execution; for no one yet had the courage to approach her. Like the headsman of her namesake, the loveliest child of Christian story, her executioners could only weep that they were bid to mar the beauty of any thing so fair; their hands were powerless to do their office; and finding at last that no one sought to bind her, she went herself and laid her gently and modestly down upon her cross. There she lay, waiting for her hour, calm and serene as if pillowed on an angel's bosom, until at length some of the spectators, induced partly by a bribe offered by the executioner, but chiefly by a bigoted hatred of her religion, bound her, and lifted up her cross, and then struck her blow after blow, until beneath their rude and unaccustomed hands she painfully expired. For a year and a day the bodies were left to hang upon their crosses, as a terror to all others of the same religion;