Fainting with terror, the assistant judges, the procurator fiscal, and the sbirri were for a few moments so overcome by the appalling scene they had just witnessed, that they thought not of raising the chief judge, who lay motionless on the pavement. But at length some of the police-officers so far recovered themselves as to be able to devote attention to that high functionary--it was, however, too late--his skull was fractured by the violence with which he had been dashed against the rough wall, and his brains were scattered on the pavement. Those who now bent over his disfigured corpse exchanged looks of unutterable horror. In the meantime the Wehr-Wolf had cleared the corridor, rapid as an arrow shot from the bow; he sprung, bounding up a flight of steep stone stairs as if the elastic air bore him on, and rushing through an open door, burst suddenly upon the crowd that was so anxiously waiting to behold the procession issue thence. Terrific was the yell that the multitude sent forth--a yell formed of a thousand combining voices, so long, so loud, so wildly agonizing, that never had the welkin rung with so appalling an ebullition of human misery before! Madly rushed the wolf amidst the people, dashing them aside, overturning them, hurling them down, bursting through the mass too dense to clear a passage of its own accord, and making the scene of horror more horrible still by mingling his hideous howlings with the cries--the shrieks--the screams that escaped from a thousand tongues. No pen can describe the awful scene of confusion and death which now took place. Swayed by no panic fear, but influenced by terrors of dreadful reality, the people exerted all their force to escape from that spot; and thus the struggling, crushing, pushing, crowding, fighting, and all the oscillations of a multitude set in motion by the direst alarms, were succeeded by the most fatal results. Women were thrown down and trampled to death, strong men were scarcely able to maintain their footing, many females were literally suffocated in the pressure of the crowd, and mothers with young children in their arms excited no sympathy. Never was the selfishness of human nature more strikingly displayed than on this occasion: no one bestowed a thought upon his neighbor: the chivalrous Florentine citizens dashed aside the weak and helpless female who barred his way with as little remorse as if she were not a being of flesh and blood; and even husbands forgot their wives, lovers abandoned their mistresses, and parents waited not an instant to succor their daughters.