which was the only answer he was capable of making. He was then removed from the bar, supported on the arms of Mr. Wouter and one of his friends, to the prison. There remains a certain mystery still shrouding the great Fauntleroy swindle. It is impossible to conjecture for what purpose the dishonest banker preserved in a private box so careful and suicidal a statement of his own misdoings. It might have been that he was contemplating immediate flight even at the very moment of his arrest, and wished to leave behind him a clear and logi cal schedule that might explain matters to and absolve his partners. It might be that Fauntleroy (with that strange confu sion of feeling and aberration of judgment that raises some thieves almost to the dig nity of monomaniacs^ wished to leave ample and clear testimony of the revenge his mis taken honor had taken on the Bank of Eng land for having refused credit to his firm. Hardly since the Perreaus, the wine-mer chants, who were hanged in 1776, or since Dr. Dodd, the popular preacher, paid the penalty at Tyburn, for forgery, in 1777, had the contemplated execution of a gentleman moved more pity, or excited such deep and universal interest. One does not see a great London banker hanged everyday. The sight drew together half the city. At daybreak a vast crowd began to roll on toward the great, gloomy, blind stone house on the hill, to scan its hard, repulsive profile against the un propitious and sunless sky, and to gape up at the coffin-like door, emblazoned with the murderer's escutcheon of iron fet ters. The sordid and greasy thousands not only extended in a close-packed mass from Ludgate Hill to the entrance of the then loathsome and penned-up Smithfield, but surged away all down Skinner Street and along Newgate Street, around that black mountain range of stone which is called St. Paul's, — far indeed beyond any point where any line of perspective or alley could afford the faintest glimpse of the scaffold. The sight was evidently considered so grand
that it was something to be even half a mile away from it. There was a ground-swell of swearing and howling and a host of ruffians, half maddened by not being able to see the gentleman banker "turned off." A cruel envy and hatred and a still more horri ble heartlessness filled the minds of those wretches. Every window and house-roof near Newgate was crowded with amateurs of executions, — well-bred men whose manners had furnished subjects for shilling-books on etiquette. Unsexed women shouted and sang below the windows let out at such profitable sums. Men, drinking to keep out the cold declared the crowd was equal to that which had witnessed Thistle wood and his gang swung out of the world for their crimes. At a quarter before eight the sheriffs had entered the prisoner's room. Fauntleroy — it is a mockery to say Mr. now — lifted his eyes sadly, and seeing them, bowed, but said nothing. The instincts of the gentleman were still there. Besides the Newgate — the Rev. Mr. Cotton, whose name thieves used to pun on — Mr. Baker was with the prisoner, and the Rev. Mr. Springett had borne with him the agony of the previous night's bitter sorrow and repentance. Fauntleroy, still true to the traditions of respectability, was dressed in a black coat and trousers, with silk stockings and evening-' dress shoes. He was perfectly composed. His face showed no change since the trial. His eyes were closed. Even this hour was perhaps preferable to the long torture of those nine years of self-accusation. The moment came. The silent but un mistakable gesture called him. There was no delay. Nothing could stop those prepa rations but the sudden death of one man. The sheriffs moved forward with serious faces. The ordinary passed on, after set form. No one required teaching as to his place in the ghastly procession. Mr. Baker and Mr. Springett, true friends even now, took each an arm of Fauntleroy, and fol lowed the sheriffs and Mr. Cotton. The wretched man never turned his head right or
