not shock the truth; and had I not possessed something of those qualities
which society does not disesteem, you would not have beheld me here at
this hour! If I had saved myself as well as my companions, I should have
left this country, perhaps forever, and commenced a very different career
abroad. I committed offences; I eluded you; I committed what, in my
case, was an act of duty: I am seized, and I perish. But the weakness of
my body destroys me, not the strength of your malice. Had I" (and as the
prisoner spake, the haughty and rapid motion, the enlarging of the form,
produced by the passion of the moment, made impressively conspicuous to
all the remarkable power of his frame),--"had I but my wonted health, my
wonted command over these limbs and these veins, I would have asked no
friend, no ally, to favour my escape. I tell you, engines and guardians
of the law, that I would have mocked your chains and defied your walls,
as ye know that I have mocked and defied them before. But my blood
creeps now only in drops through its courses; and the heart that I had of
old stirs feebly and heavily within me." The prisoner paused a moment,
and resumed in an altered tone: "Leaving, then, my own character to the
ordeal of report, I cannot perhaps do better than leave to the same
criterion that of the witness against me. I will candidly own that under
other circumstances it might have been otherwise. I will candidly avow
that I might have then used such means as your law awards me to procure
an acquittal and to prolong my existence,--though in a new scene; as it
is, what matters the cause in which I receive my sentence? Nay, it is
even better to suffer by the first than to linger to the last. It is
some consolation not again to stand where I now stand; to go through the
humbling solemnities which I have this day endured; to see the smile of
some, and retort the frown of others; to wrestle with the anxiety of the
heart, and to depend on the caprice of the excited nerves. It is
something to feel one part of the drama of disgrace is over, and that I
may wait unmolested in my den until, for one time only, I am again the