approaching him. Suddenly the supporting timbers below him gave way; a
convulsive heave of the billowing flames seemed for a moment to raise the
statue; and then, as if on some impulse of despair, the presiding deity
appeared not to fall, but to throw himself into the fiery deluge, for he
went down head foremost; and in all respects, the descent had the air of a
voluntary act. What followed? From every one of the bridges over the
river, and from other open areas which commanded the spectacle, there
arose a sustained uproar of admiration and sympathy. Some few years before
this event, a prodigious fire occurred at Liverpool; the _Goree_, a vast
pile of warehouses close to one of the docks, was burned to the ground.
The huge edifice, eight or nine stories high, and laden with most
combustible goods, many thousand bales of cotton, wheat and oats in
thousands of quarters, tar, turpentine, rum, gunpowder, &c., continued
through many hours of darkness to feed this tremendous fire. To
aggravate the calamity, it blew a regular gale of wind; luckily for the
shipping, it blew inland, that is, to the east; and all the way down to
Warrington, eighteen miles distant to the eastward, the whole air was
illuminated by flakes of cotton, often saturated with rum, and by what
seemed absolute worlds of blazing sparks, that lighted up all the upper
chambers of the air. All the cattle lying abroad in the fields through a
breadth of eighteen miles, were thrown into terror and agitation. Men, of
course, read in this hurrying overhead of scintillating and blazing
vortices, the annunciation of some gigantic calamity going on in
Liverpool; and the lamentation on that account was universal. But that
mood of public sympathy did not at all interfere to suppress or even to
check the momentary bursts of rapturous admiration, as this arrowy sleet
of many-colored fire rode on the wings of hurricane, alternately through
open depths of air, or through dark clouds overhead.

Precisely the same treatment is applied to murders. After the first