It was a clear June day, beginning to be hot; and the birds were chirping in the trees about the place--for at times the silence was so great that one could hear a pin fall, as they say.

Now I felt on the brink of hell--at the thought of the pains that were waiting for my friends, at the memory of that great effusion of blood that had been poured out and of the more that was to follow.

There was something shocking in the quietness and the glory of the day--such a day as many that I had spent in the meadows of Hare Street, or in the high woods--faced as it was with this dreadful thing against the blue sky, and the five figures beneath it, like figures in a frieze, and the smoke of the cauldron that drifted up continually or brought a reek of tar to my nostrils.

And, again, all this would pass; and I would feel that it was not hell but heaven that waited; and that all was but as a thin veil, a little shadow of death, that hung between me and the unimaginable glories; and that at a word all would dissolve away and Christ come and this world be ended.

So, then, the minutes passed for me: I said my _Paternoster_ and _Ave_ and _Credo_ and _De Profundis_, over and over again; praying that the passage of those men might be easy, and that their deaths might be as sacrifices both for themselves and for the country.