novel. The youth was handsome. The truth was, Phœbe had before now owned to herself, that he was the most captivating being that she had ever even dreamed of. The garden, the trees, the gate, even the indistinct outline of the House of Correction at the back, seemed to dissolve away; and all the time she heard him eagerly, ardently pouring out the same celestial notes into her ear. But at his last words, when he was saying, "I cannot say more now; it seems fickle, but I do not care; we cannot help these things. I did love her; but since I saw you, and saw that you were not altogether indifferent, and seemed to encourage me" at this Phœbe came back to prose.

"No, no, never!" she said. "I never did that at least never intended it. You must not say nor think such a thing."

"But you did," he went on. "I saw it at the beginning. You would not have asked me to come here again if you did not like me a little. No. Adelaide is very grand, and noble, and resolute, and all that, and I did admire her; but now it is you, all you. You have driven her image out of my mind altogether."

But Phœbe, now recovered, was not a little shocked at this faithlessness, and at her own apparent disloyalty. In an instant she saw the dangers of the situation, and was really terrified. She now wished that she had never come on this foolish, dangerous errand. She felt she could no longer be equal to the situation, especially as she knew not what to say or do. In her hand she felt that there was a letter, though she knew not how it came there. Retreat, flight, was the only course. She turned to go, but, as she did so, gave a short cry. Two figures confronted her, a hand caught her arm, and snatched away the letter. The officers of justice were on her-officers Cooke and Corbett and the delinquent was captured, red handed.

With a voice that trembled with alarm, Miss Emma Cooke turned to the intruder. "Assistance has been sent for; the police are coming; so you had better begone

-at once."

"I assure you, madam--" he began. "The gardener will be here as soon as he has put on his clothes," and the intrepid lady, advancing, put her own key into the lock, and held the gate open for him to depart.

"I am going, madam," he said; "but you will let me say this much"

"Not a word, until you have left the

garden. Miss Dawson, retire-go, into the house at once."

"Indeed it is not his fault," said Phœbe, eagerly. "I must say that."

"Hush! Oh, stop; take her in at once," said the "exempt" to her follower; and Phœbe was seized incontinently, and hurried away. Under the spell of Miss Cooke's eye, the lover felt himself forced to retire, when the gate was closed with a vigorous clash, and the bolt smartly shot home.

"I assure you," he said again, in the most appealing and soothing tones he could assume, "she is not to blame, on my word and honour as a gentleman.”

"You a gentleman!" repeated Miss Cooke, through the bars, with infinite scorn. "A pretty gentleman. But you shall hear more of this. We shall summons you! It's disgraceful! We shall summons you for trespassing on the grounds andhouse-breaking. You have been suspected for some time. Your doings at the Red Lion have been watched."

He was still pleading in the softest and most dulcet tones for he felt it was his only opportunity, and that poor Phœbe would after that night be helpless-when the dragon turned from him abruptly, and walked away to the house. To pursue the interview under such circumstances was, of course, impossible, and our hero retired.

Near the house Miss Cooke overtook Phœbe and her guard. Phœbe had in the meantime relieved her mind by addressing Corbett as "Spy!"

"You awful, awful girl!" said Miss Cooke as they entered. "You are not fit to sleep under this roof with the other girls. You should be put by yourself in an out-house. It contaminates me to talk to you."

"Pooh! nonsense!" said Phœbe, contemptuously, almost with squared arms. She was ready to do battle with the world with anyone.

In her room-there was no out-house prepared or suitable for such a class of criminal-she was inclined to laugh at the whole as a lark" of the first magnitude. After all, a few words would explain it all. She had got through worse scrapes. In fact, she did not think of the peril. The sweet delicious music that she had never heard before, came back on her, filling her soul. So that charming being loved her! How strange! How wonderful! She forgot everything else, even Adelaide; and as she fell asleep it was still in her ears.

book by Achille Bocchi, dated 1555, gives an engraving of an Italian nobleman being beheaded; a heavy blade suspended by cords from a crossbar at the top of a frame, is represented as falling on the neck of the victim; the machine was called a mannaja, or mannaia. In 1632, some such apparatus was employed in Languedoc, for decapitating Duc Henri de Montmorenci. It was also ascertained that Scotland in the North, and Persia in the East, had employed machines bearing a resemblance to this.

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Among the strange scenes of the French revolutionary days, not the least strange was that of the National Assembly listening gravely to the details given on these matters. Dr. Louis conferred with Dr. Guillotin, and also with the famous executioner Sanson. Sanson specially urged that, if all executions henceforth were to be by beheading, a machine would be greatly needed; as he distrusted his own power of using the sword or the axe so frequently, and so accurately, as would be necessary. After hearing all the explanations and suggestions, the Assembly passed a decree for the use of a decapitatingmachine, in substitution of the halter, the axe, the sword, and the various instruments of torture such as the rack. One Schmidt, German musical instrument maker, residing at Paris, was taken into council; and he, Guillotin, Louis, and Sanson, settled among them the details of the machine. Nay, there was even a fifth adviser. The king, always fond of lockmaking and amateur engineering, requested to have the designs shown to him; and he suggested an improvement which was practically adopted. A sum of five thousand five hundred francs was paid for the machine, constructed for the National Assembly by Guidon the carpenter. An attempt was made to give the name of Louisette, or Louison, to it, in honour of the learned doctor; but the name Guillotine had been current in the public mind for two or three years, and nothing could supplant it, although Dr. Guillotin certainly never sought to have his memory thus perpetrated. The apparatus was first tried in decapitating the dead bodies of three men, and some live animals, at the prison of the Bicêtre. Dr. Louis, after seeing the efficacy of the invention tested in this way, died just before the terrible days of the Revolution came on; and was therefore denied the pleasure, or spared the pain (whichever it

might be), of seeing the guillotine employed as the most dread of political instruments.

The first victim was an ordinary criminal, a highwayman named Nicholas Jacques Pelletier, who was guillotined on the 25th of April, 1792. The Chronique de Paris, in its next day's issue, stated that "The novelty of this mode of execution caused a considerable augmentation in the number of persons who usually witness such scenes. The machine is with good reason preferred to other modes of putting to death. One human being is not directly employed in decapitating another; and the promptness with which the operation takes place is more consistent with the spirit of the law, which is often severe but should never be cruel." The first political guillotining took place four months later; when Louis David Collinot d'Augremont was executed by torchlight, for the crime of having been among "the enemies of the people" on the 10th of August; the day on which "the people broke into the Tuileries, expelled the royal family, and filled the palace and its surroundings with blood.

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The National Assembly was succeeded by the National Convention, and by this Convention was founded the Revolutionary Tribunal, in April, 1793. Then, indeed, commenced the fearful period, always since recorded in history as the Reign of Terror, which lasted until July, 1794. How many unhappy persons were guillotined during these fifteen months is not accurately known; but in the final six weeks preceding the fall of Robespierre, more than eleven hundred heads rolled in the dust in Paris alone. At first, the guillotine was set up in the Place du Carrousel for political "suspects," and in the Place de Grève for ordinary criminals. The windows of the chamber in which the National Convention sat looked out into the Place du Carrousel; the deputies, though ready enough to denounce, were not willing that executions should go on daily under their very eyes; and the guillotine was removed to the Place de la Révolution, where it remained till times became quieter.

During these sanguinary scenes, the state of society in Paris was strange in many ways. Physicians and philosophers held learned discussions about decapitation, arguing pro and con as to whether the head feels any sensation of pain after being severed from the body. As the controversialists were alike unable and unNot the least remarkable chapter in the story of the guillotine is that which relates to the renowned family of the Sansonsrenowned for the deeds of blood which several generations of them performed, and almost as much so for their quietness, mildness, kindness, and even religious feeling. The name was originally Sansoni, belonging to an Italian family, who migrated from Florence to Paris in the time of Mary de Medicis.

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to the days of the Consulate and the Empire. He wrote a portion of Autobiography, marked by the omission of all notice of his much-regretted suggestion of a beheading-machine.

The indifference to death, induced by an almost daily familiarity with descriptions and spectacles relating to it, showed itself in ways which we, in our quiet country and quiet times, can hardly regard as credible. During the Terror, the guillotining of several persons every daysometimes many scores a day-became so much a matter of course as to be treated by the Parisians as an ordinary element in city business. In the prisons, to "play at guillotine" was a favourite amusement among the prisoners; and many jokes were manufactured about the "national razor." Some of the shopkeepers went so far, as to display in their windows earrings shaped like little guillotines. Two years before the fall of Robespierre, when violence had begun but had not yet assumed its more fearful aspect, aristocratic or Royalist families kept a good deal within doors in their Parisian mansions; and sometimes amused themselves in a strangely morbid way. Dolls or puppets were provided, with features resembling those of the chief popular leaders. After dinner, during dessert, a small mahogany guillotine was introduced, and wheeled along the table from guest to guest; one by one the puppets were placed under the knife, and their heads chopped off. Inside the trunk or body of the puppet was a liquid, vinous and fragrant enough to be tasteful to the palate, but blood-red; this flowed out over the table; and the guests, including ladies, dipped their handkerchiefs into it, and applied it to their lips! In all probability this strange game was played but seldom, but Opposition journalists magnified it into a regular habit of

"les aristocrats."

About a dozen years ago ALL THE YEAR ROUND gave some account of a book pub

the Sanson family, and purporting to be written by one of the veritable guillotiners.* An English edition of that work has recently been published in a somewhat abbreviated form. We will give a few items from it, for the sake of such readers as may not have the former article at hand; but will add to them some particulars from other authorities.

Charles Sanson, born in 1655, at Abbeville, was a lieutenant in the French army. Some escapades brought him into trouble and then into disgrace; he married the daughter of the executioner of Rouen; then went to Paris, and became, in 1685, official executioner for the Supreme Court of Justice. Torture by rack and wheel was then in vogue; and he had fourteen years of this work, varying with the more usual exercise of the axe and the swordthe use of the latter being entrusted to a humbler functionary. He was succeeded in the office by his son Charles, who became known in the genealogy of the family as Charles Sanson the Second; he put many eminent men, including Count de Horn, out of existence during his headsman's career from 1703 to 1726. His son, Charles Jean Baptiste, succeeded him in the office; the said Charles Jean Baptiste, it is true, was only seven years old; but the family contrived to secure the monopoly and the emoluments, which were very considerable. Other hands did the decapitating while the boy looked on, sanctioning the proceeding by his official presence. Arrived at man's estate he handled the sword and axe himself, and continued so to do until 1754. We now come to the first of the two great Sansons, par excellence-Charles Henri, who ranks in order as Sanson the Fourth. Born in 1740, he was sent to a good school by his father (Charles Jean Baptiste), and made fair progress. Being the son of an executioner, albeit so distinguished a one as the royal hereditary headsman, the other boys in the school did not like to be on sociable terms with him; and so the schoolmaster insisted on his removal. The same thing occurred at a second school; and then the father caused the son's education to be finished at home, under the care of a poor French abbé, who had been kindly succoured by the family. At the age of thirty, Charles Henri succeeded his father as state executioner in 1770. He lived well, dressed elegantly, and was generally known as Monsieur de Paris. His first love was destined to become, not an executioner's wife, but the Comtesse Dubarry. Sanson had not much work to do for twenty years, so far as concerned political prisoners; seeing that Louis the Fifteenth was too frivolous and pleasureloving, and Louis the Sixteenth too mild and inoffensive, to show much proneness to chop off men's heads. When, however, the events of the 10th of August and the 2nd of September, 1792, had given the Parisians the first taste of revolutionary blood, and when the guillotine had become officially adopted, the demands on the executioner became more frequent. Although neither the axe nor the sword was now used, the chief executioner had much responsibility resting on him, in seeing that the details of the guillotining were properly conducted without letting the victim escape, and, at the same time, without subjecting him to unnecessary suffering.

It was a sore trial to Sanson, when requested to decapitate the hapless Louis the Sixteenth. He may or may not have been smitten with the reforming tendencies of the time; but he could not forget that the Sansons had been state executioners for generation after generation, in some sense servants of successive kings of France. He did not wish to be instrumental in putting to death one who, the enthusiasts declared, was to be the last king that France would ever see. Other considerations, however, pressed upon him. He was clearly made to understand that he and his family would be placed in an awkward predicament if he refused; it was certain that some other executioner would easily be found, unaffected by such scruples; and he feared that the poorking would suffer more, instead of less, from brutal and inexperienced hands. He yielded a reluctant consent, and guillo

tined the king on the 21st of January, 1793. Whether it was a junior executioner who held up the bleeding head to the jeers of a maddened crowd, or whether this was done by the ruffian Santerre, certain it is that the head was so held up. Sanson sickened at the sight, went home, fell into an illness, and died six months afterwards. A Revolutionary journal, the Thermomètre Politique, gave a long account of the execution, and made it appear that the king was both ridiculous and cowardly on the scaffold. Sanson, although in the fashion of the time he called himself "Citizen Sanson," could not brook this. He wrote to the journal, giving a simple account of what had taken place, and showed that the poor monarch had maintained as much firmness and dignity as could reasonably be expected at so terrible a moment.

Sanson the Fourth was, as we have said, a man rather moral and religious than otherwise; above the level, in these respects, of average Frenchmen in those days. After his death, his will was found to contain a request that a mass for the repose of the soul of the king should be said annually, on the 21st of January, in a neighbouring church. The authorities permitted this, only on condition that the monarch should be called simply Louis, or Louis Capet, without any regal or honorary addition to his name.

The next Sanson, Henri, who succeeded to the office of executioner in 1793, scrupulously observed the instructions of his father for the long period of forty-four years, till his death. This member of the Sanson family, the greatest in fame, had a larger amount of sanguinary work to do than all the other Sansons put together. It was he who guillotined Queen Marie Antoinette, the Princess Elizabeth, Charlotte Corday, Malherbe, General Custine, Barbaroux, Pétion, Brissot, Vergniaud, Gensonné, Egalité d'Orléans, Madame Roland, Bailly, General Brunet, the Comtesse Dubarry, Hébert, Ronsin, Anacharsis Clootz, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Philippeaux, Legendre, Count Lavalette, Robespierre, Couthon, St. Just, and host of other persons involved in the horrors of that sanguinary period. But this fearful work did not harden the heart of Sanson. He regarded himself as a professional servant of the state, bound to fulfil the duties of his profession, but not forbidden to be a humane and Christian man in other matters. He had received a

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