distance over the scene.

It was a bright morning in May. The white swans were sailing tranquilly
to and fro over the silver basin, and the mavis, blackbird, and
nightingale, which haunted the groves surrounding the castle and the
town, were singing as if the daybreak were ushering in a summer festival.

But it was not to a merry-making that the soldiers were marching and the
citizens. thronging so eagerly from every street and alley towards the
castle. By four o'clock the Outer and Inner Courts had been lined with
detachments of the Prince's guard and companies of other regiments to the
number of 1200 men. Occupying the north-eastern side of the court rose
the grim, time-worn front of the ancient hall, consisting of one tall
pyramidal gable of ancient grey brickwork flanked with two tall slender
towers, the whole with the lancet-shaped windows and severe style of the
twelfth century, excepting a rose-window in the centre with the decorated
mullions of a somewhat later period.

In front of the lower window, with its Gothic archway hastily converted
into a door, a shapeless platform of rough, unhewn planks had that night
been rudely patched together. This was the scaffold. A slight railing
around it served to protect it from the crowd, and a heap of coarse sand
had been thrown upon it. A squalid, unclean box of unplaned boards,
originally prepared as a coffin for a Frenchman who some time before had
been condemned to death for murdering the son of Goswyn Meurskens, a
Hague tavern-keeper, but pardoned by the Stadholder--lay on the scaffold.
It was recognized from having been left for a long time, half forgotten,
at the public execution-place of the Hague.

Upon this coffin now sat two common soldiers of ruffianly aspect playing