and a lumpish face devoid of any trace of insensibility, who had been,
within the knowledge of the murdered youth, an embezzler of certain small
moneys belonging to his master, and who had taken this hopeful mode of
putting a possible accuser out of his way. All of which he confessed
next day, like a sulky wretch who couldn't be troubled any more, now that
they had got hold of him, and meant to make an end of him. I saw him
once again, on the day of my departure from the Inn. In that Canton the
headsman still does his office with a sword; and I came upon this
murderer sitting bound, to a chair, with his eyes bandaged, on a scaffold
in a little market-place. In that instant, a great sword (loaded with
quicksilver in the thick part of the blade) swept round him like a gust
of wind or fire, and there was no such creature in the world. My wonder
was, not that he was so suddenly dispatched, but that any head was left
unreaped, within a radius of fifty yards of that tremendous sickle.

That was a good Inn, too, with the kind, cheerful landlady and the honest
landlord, where I lived in the shadow of Mont Blanc, and where one of the
apartments has a zoological papering on the walls, not so accurately
joined but that the elephant occasionally rejoices in a tiger's hind legs
and tail, while the lion puts on a trunk and tusks, and the bear,
moulting as it were, appears as to portions of himself like a leopard. I
made several American friends at that Inn, who all called Mont Blanc
Mount Blank,--except one good-humoured gentleman, of a very sociable
nature, who became on such intimate terms with it that he spoke of it
familiarly as "Blank;" observing, at breakfast, "Blank looks pretty tall
this morning;" or considerably doubting in the courtyard in the evening,
whether there warn't some go-ahead naters in our country, sir, that would
make out the top of Blank in a couple of hours from first start--now!

Once I passed a fortnight at an Inn in the North of England, where I was