CHAPTER IV. It was dim evening, and sentence was about to be passed upon a prisoner. He turns his head. It is Fwyall. The chief, and almost the only witness, has been the old harper. The Chester jury retire just as the lamps are lighted. They return in half an hour. It seemed a lifetime to the prisoner. There is a pause of intense expectancy. "Gentlemen of the jury, have you agreed upon the verdict? Is the prisoner at the bar, Hugh-y-Fwyall, guilty of the crime whereof he stands indicted, or not guilty ?" "Guilty !" Then for the first time Fwyall, who had never spoken during the trial till now, with a countenance expressive of the most diabolical malice and revenge, poured a volley of execrations upon the harper who had accused him: "D-n seize you, you foul old villain -the red plague blister you! Had I liberty now, I would use it to take your life If I escape from prison, I vow to Heaven I will murder you [" "May God visit the blood of this man upon my head if another murder is committed by his bloody hand," said the judge. "Go, Mr. Sheriff, procure a carpenter, have a gallows erected and a coffin made, on the very spot where the monster stands; for from this bench I will not remove until I see him executed."* * A similar execution did take place in the last century, improbable and horrible as it may now seem. The Sheriff obeyed the order; a gallows was erected within that very hall of justice, and that same night, in the presence of the people, the judge, the jury, and Fwyall ascended the scaffold, cursing and blaspheming with his latest breath, spurning the consolations of the chaplain, and defying the angry God whom he was about to meet. His body was hung in chains at the mouth of the deserted mine. So upon Owen, as well as Hugh, the wretched murderer, fell the curse of St. George's Well. 87 THE MONEY BANKS FIELD. A TALE FOUNDED ON FACT. I do love these ancient ruins. We never tread upon them, but we set WEBSTER'S Duchess of Malfy. IT is now full thirty summers since, as a young artist, I spent some months of a long vacation in a pedestrian tour in North Wales. I remember well, as though it were but yesterday, setting out with a full purse and a light heart, staff in hand, from the gate of old gableended Chester, through Wales to wend "my solitary way." I sailed without chart or compass, following no more imperative guide than the caprice of the moment, or the wanderings of my own sweet will. Here I scaled a mountain, legend-haunted, there I visited an antique mansion. Here I lay like a crazed poet, musing in spite of myself for hours beside a fall, lulled by the throbbing plunge and the music-thunder of its waters; there I groped for the live-long day amid the rarely visited ruins of some grey-stoned, nameless abbey, repeopling it with the beings of the past, and summoning its white-clad chapter from their long, long sleep in the echoing tombs beneath my feet, before the tribunal of my mind. Now I strove, perched on some jutting crag, to realize the mountain-worship of the antediluvian races, or to shape spirits of the storm from the white mist that boiled up in smoking wreaths from the seething jaws of the bottomless pit below me. Now lying under the pinnacles of some ruined sea-tower, I rhapsodized from the riches of a brain, "new stuffed with old romance," the pa |