From first to last Wallace and Hislop
had both most strongly protested that they were entirely guiltless.
That, of course, went for nothing. But when, on the day of execution,
the ropes which were used to hang the poor creatures both broke; when
the man who ran to fetch sounder hemp fell as he hurried, and broke his
leg, then the credulous and fickle public began to imagine that
Providence was intervening to save men falsely convicted. Then, too, the
tale spread abroad among a simple-minded people how a girl, sick unto
death, had said to her mother that when Hislop's time came she would be
in heaven with him; and it was told that as Hislop's body, after
execution, was carried into that same tenement, in a room of which the
sick girl lay, her spirit fled. Judgment, also, was said to have fallen
on a woman who occupied a room in that house, and who had violently and
excitedly objected to the body of a hanged man being brought to defile
any abode which sheltered her. That same evening the body of her own
son, found drowned in Tweed, was carried over that threshold across
which she had tried to prevent them from bringing the corpse of Hislop.
All these events tended to swing round public opinion, and those who
formerly had been most satisfied of their guilt, now most strenuously
protested their entire belief in the innocence of the hanged men.
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