On the day after to-morrow he was to die. He was not to be shot, like a soldier, nor beheaded, as kings and noblemen had been; he was to suffer the ignominy of hanging. The thought gave him keenest torture. That dismal day drew to a close, and, at eventide, when the attendant came with his food, he made one last earnest appeal for writing materials, that he might write a brief letter to his wife. But such a grant would be a violation of prison law; it could not be done. Then he closed his lips, resolved not to speak again save to the Heavenly Father. The night passed, and another dark and dismal day. Another evening came, and another night shut down over the great prison. Otho's last night of earth, as the few grim marks on his dungeon wall told him. At eleven o'clock he threw himself upon his hard straw pallet and tried to sleep. He heard the solemn bells strike the midnight hour, and a few moments later the warder of that corridor opened the little wicket in his door and looked in upon him. Had our prisoner been on the outside of his cell at that particular time, he would have seen a movement on the part of the sentinel strange and unusual. This sentinel had softly and noiselessly followed the warder to that door, had stood very near while he looked in at the wicket, and then, when he had started on to the next cell, he leaped upon him as a cat would strike its prey. A single blow of a sand-bag upon the warder's head felled him to the granite pavement as though a lightning-bolt had smitten him. On the next instant the sentinel was upon his knees, those knees upon the fallen man's breast, with a folded napkin, in which was a broad, flat, fine sponge, pressed tightly over the mouth and nostrils. A brief space so, then the guardsman took from his breast pocket a small flask and renewed the chloroform in the sponge. [Illustration: "A SPONGE PRESSED TIGHTLY OVER THE MOUTH."] Otho Maximilian had heard the opening of the wicket, and had seen the face that had peered in upon him. He had again closed his eyes, when he heard a dull, heavy thud, as though a ponderous body had fallen upon the adamantine floor. The sound was so unusual, so strange and unaccountable, that he was startled--not with fear, but with a nameless, shapeless spectre of the unseen. He arose and bent his ear attentively. Ere long he heard the light clatter of a key as it was inserted into the lock of his door, and presently the door was opened and a man came in--a man habited in the uniform of the National Guard. "--Sh!" whispered the guardsman. "Speak not, but do as I bid you. Throw off that ragged blouse. Sacré!--will you obey? Bah!--it is a friend! Now act, and quickly!" "What!--you?--Mar----" "Will you stop your tongue and obey? We will talk by-and-by."