Many a mechanic, who set out with his dinner in his basket and his tools upon his back, on his way to his daily labour, is tempted by those he there meets with to stay beyond his allotted hour--until finding that it is too late to accomplish a full day's work, he returns to some neighbouring tap-room, and so the time is passed in recounting and listening to a long history of former executions, until night and drunkenness overtake him, at the very hour when the faithful wife, having prepared his evening meal, is sitting with pale cheek patiently awaiting his return. Many an unfortunate man may date his ruin from the day he first witnessed an execution--as the first hour that threw him amid the group who haunt the foot of the gallows; and as human nature is more prone to stoop to vice than to soar aloft to virtue, so from that moment he sank never more to rise again, all his finer feelings blunted, and he himself lowering all who were once endeared to him to his own vicious standard. Such as the herds among have no pity for the dead; they pick out every sentence uttered by the witnesses in favour of the culprit who is about to suffer--they turn not to the widowed wife, the weeping children, and the once happy home which the deed he has done has left dark and desolate. They argue that drink or anger, temptation or poverty, or a weariness of life, drove him to the act, and that, saving the momentary pang which for ever ends his troubles, his last hours were soothed by kindness and attention; and that, for their parts, they would sooner prefer such an ending than to be left to die amid disease, want, neglect, and wretchedness, with no human being near to breathe a word of hope and comfort. Time after time they have witnessed the worst--have seen the law armed, and in full power strike with all its might--and turned aside without a feeling of terror. Life has been taken away before their very eyes; they have seen a fellow-creature hanged "to make an English holiday," and they have gone and again aroused the vengeance of "Justice," have destroyed life as they have seen it destroyed, have made that their own act and deed, which the law is more formally--for lack of other merciful modes of punishment--again compelled to follow as an example, taking life for life, and visiting evil with evil, not in a spirit of hatred or revenge, but because custom has sanctioned the necessity. Above the murmur and tumult of that noisy assembly, the lowing and bleating of cattle, as they were driven into the stalls and pens of Smithfield, fell with a strange and unnatural sound upon the ear, calling up for a few moments the tranquillity of green hill-sides, and broad, level pasture-lands, where the fever, and the fret, and the crime from crowded cities never came. What a contrast to the scene that stretched below, the cold grey dawn of the raw morning breaking upon the dark and weather-stained front of the prison, and giving to those