and if the picture lacks the magnificent setting of the Amboise tragedy, it is by no means destitute of power. There is a certain grandeur in being hanged from such a dizzy height.
Our guide next pointed out the opening of the mythical oubliette. If the condemned toiled wearily up to their beetling scaffold, the executioners were spared at least the labour of carrying their bodies down again. After they had been picturesquely hanged under the king's own eye,—for we were asked to believe that Louis walked two miles along a subterranean passage to inspect the ordinary, and by no means infrequent, processes of justice,—the corpses were tumbled into the oubliette, and made their own headlong way to the Loire.
One more detail was added to this interesting and deeply coloured fable. The right-hand wall of the courtyard was studded, on a level with the balcony, with huge rusty iron nails. There were rows upon rows of these unlovely and apparently useless objects which tradition had not failed to turn to good account. For every man hanged on that spot by the indefatigable Tristan, a nail was, it seems, driven into the
