Then the doctors will group around me, and one will relieve another in successive turns in standing on a stool, his arms passed around me to keep me from swinging like a pendulum, his ear pressed close to my chest, while he counts my fading heart-beats.

Sometimes twenty minutes elapse after the trap is sprung ere the heart stops beating.

Oh, trust me, they make most scientifically sure that a man is dead once they get him on a rope.
I still wander aside from my narrative to ask a question or two of society.

I have a right so to wander and so to question, for in a little while they are going to take me out and do this thing to me.

If the neck of the victim be broken by the alleged shrewd arrangement of knot and noose, and by the alleged shrewd calculation of the weight of the victim and the length of slack, then why do they manacle the arms of the victim?
Society, as a whole, is unable to answer this question.