of contradictions, of fallacies, of truths, and of wrongs, which make up
the sum of our existence.

The following pages are the result of this dreaming. The reader is left to
his own intelligence for the moral.

A respectable English writer observed:--"All pages of human life are worth
reading; the wise instruct; the gay divert us; the imprudent teach us what
to shun; the absurd cure the spleen."




The Headsman




Chapter I.


Day glimmered and I went, a gentle breeze
Ruffling the Leman lake.

Rogers.


The year was in its fall, according to a poetical expression of our own,
and the morning bright, as the fairest and swiftest bark that navigated
the Leman lay at the quay of the ancient and historical town of Geneva,