at best, short to the lockup hour, when the common rooms and

corridors would be delivered over to the great dogs who kept

watch there through the night. The prisoners were far from

insensible or unfeeling; their ways arose out of the condition of the

time. Similarly, though with a subtle difference, a species of

fervour or intoxication, known, without doubt, to have led some

persons to brave the guillotine unnecessarily, and to die by it, was

not mere boastfulness, but a wild infection of the wildly shaken

public mind. In seasons of pestilence, some of us will have a secret

attraction to the diseasea terrible passing inclination to die of it.

And all of us have like wonders hidden in our breasts, only

needing circumstances to evoke them.

The passage to the Conciergerie was short and dark; the night

in its vermin-haunted cells was long and cold. Next day, fifteen

prisoners were put to the bar before Charles Darnay’s name was

called. All the fifteen were condemned, and the trials of the whole

occupied an hour and a half.

“Charles Evremonde, called Darnay,” was at length arraigned.

His judges sat upon the Bench in feathered hats; but the rough

red cap and tricoloured cockade was the head-dress otherwise

prevailing. Looking at the Jury and the turbulent audience, he

might have thought that the usual order of things was reversed,