and relished them. Every man braced himself up in his seat.

"Why, how's that, lawyer?" said a townsman who sat tailor-fashion on a
bench; he would hardly have been surprised if the lawyer had proved
beyond question that he swam swanlike among the Isles of Greece.

"I'll tell you a story," said the gentleman addressed. "There was an
ancient family in Yorkshire, and the lord of the house was of a very
splenetive temper. One day in a fit of jealousy he killed his wife,
and put to death all of his children who were at home by throwing them
over the battlements of his castle. He had one remaining child, and it
was an infant, and was nursed at a farmhouse a mile away. He had set
out for the farm with an intent to destroy his only remaining child,
when a storm of thunder and lightning came on, and he stopped."

"Thought it was a warning, I should say," interrupted a listener.

"It awakened the compunctions of conscience, and he desisted from his
purpose."

"Well?"

"What do you think he did next?"

"Cannot guess--drowned himself?"

"No, and this proves what I say, that a murderer and a hero are all
but one. He surrendered himself to justice, and stood mute at the bar,
and, in order to secure his estates to his surviving child, he had the
resolution to die under the dreadful punishment of _peine forte_."