“Is milder!” said Spiagudry, scarcely daring to breathe.
“Yes,” rejoined the hangman, with the satisfied and indifferent air of an artist talking of his own art; “they brand him first, with a hot iron, with the letter S, on the calf of the leg.”
“And then?” broke in the old keeper, upon whom it would have been difficult to inflict this part of the sentence.
“Then,” said the executioner, “they merely hang him.”
“Well, what’s the matter with you? You look at me as the victim looks at the gallows.”
“I am glad,” said the hermit, “to see that people are growing more humane.”
At this moment, the storm having ceased, the clear, intermittent sound of a horn was distinctly heard outside.
“Nychol,” said his wife, “they are in search of some malefactor; that’s the horn of the bowmen.”
“The horn of the bowmen!” repeated each of the company, in different accents, but Spiagudry in tones of unmistakable terror.
They had scarcely uttered the words when there was a knock at the door.
Only a man, a sign, is needed; the elements of revolution are ready. Who will be the first? So soon as there is a fulcrum, everything will move.--BONAPARTE.
Loevig is a large town, situated on the north side of Throndhjem fjord, and sheltered by a low chain of bare hills, singularly diversified by various sorts of crops, like broad bits of mosaic resting upon the horizon. The appearance of the town is gloomy; the fishermen’s cabins, made of twigs and reeds, the conical hut, constructed of earth and stones, in which the invalid miner spends the few days which his scanty savings allow him to devote to sunshine and rest, and the frail ruin which the chamois-hunter in his turn decks with a straw roof and walls hung with skins, line streets longer than the town itself, because they are narrow and crooked. In a square where now exist only the remains of a great tower, once stood the ancient fortress built by Horda the Fine Archer, lord of Loevig, and brother-in-arms of the pagan king Halfdan, occupied in 1698 by the mayor of the town, who would have been the best-lodged citizen in the city, if it had not been for the silvery stork who every summer perched on the tip of the sharp spire of the church, like the white pearl on the top of a mandarin’s pointed cap.