In an anteroom a crowd of macers, city guardsmen, messengers-at-arms, and officials in the blue livery of the city, laced with yellow, and wearing the triple castle on their cuffs and collars, a number of persons cited as witnesses, &c., lounged about, or lolled on the wooden benches. The ceiling of the apartment was low, and the deep recesses of the doors and windows showed the vast solidity of the massively panelled walls. A huge fire blazed in a grate that resembled an iron basket on four sturdy legs, and its red light glinted on the varied costumes, the weather-beaten visages, polished headpieces and partisans of those who crowded round it. The entrance of Walter Fenton and his escort excited neither attention nor curiosity; and feeling acutely his degraded position, he sought a retired corner, and seated himself on a wooden bench. The groups around him conversed only in whispers. A murmur of voices came at intervals from the inner chamber; and Walter often gazed with deep interest at its antiquely fashioned doorway, the features of which remained long and vividly impressed on his memory; for he longed to behold, but dreaded to encounter, the stern conclave its carved panels concealed from his view. Anon a cry--a shrill and fearful cry--announced that some dreadful work was being enacted within; every man looked gravely in his neighbour's face, (save Maclutchy, who smiled,) and the blood rushed back on Walter's heart tumultuously. Deep, hollow, and heart-harrowing groans succeeded; then were heard the sound of hammers and the creaking of a block as when a rope runs rapidly through the sheave; then a low murmur of voices again, and all was still; so still, that Walter heard the pulsations of his heart, and in spite of his natural courage, it quailed at the prospect of what he too might have to undergo. Suddenly the door of the dreaded chamber flew open, and the common Doomster and his two assistants, with their muscular arms bared, and their leather aprons girt up for exertion, issued forth, bearing the half lifeless and wholly miserable Ichabod Bummel. His countenance was pale and ghastly; his teeth were clenched, and his eyes set; his limbs hanging pendant and powerless, bore terrible evidence of the agonies caused by the iron boots, as his fingers, covered with blood, did of the thumb-screws. He groaned heavily. "What has the gallows loon confessed, Pate?" asked Maclutchy, eagerly. "Sae muckle, that the pyets will be pyking his head on the Netherbow-porte when the sun rises the morn," replied Mr. Patrick Pincer, the heartless finisher of the law, whose brawny arms and blood-stained apron, together with all the disgusting associations of his frightful occupation rendered him a revolting character. "He defied the haill council as a generation o' vipers; boasted o' being a naturalized Hollander, and denied his ain mother-country."