There, in
the stern-walk, stood the lady, already mentioned in this chapter, a
keen spectator of the awful scene. No one but a maid was near her,
however; the men of her companionship not being of moods stern enough
to be at her side. Cuffe turned away from this sight in still stronger
disgust; and just at that moment a common cry arose from the boats.
Looking round, he was just in time to see the unfortunate Caraccioli
dragged from his knees by the neck, until he rose, by a steady
man-of-war pull, to the end of the yard; leaving his companion alone on
the scaffold, lost in prayer. There was a horrible minute of the
struggles between life and death, when the body, so late the tenement of
an immortal spirit, hung, like one of the jewel-blocks of the ship,
dangling passively at the end of the spar, as insensible as the wood
which sustained it.
CHAPTER XV.
"Sleep, sleep, thou sad one, on the sea;
The wash of waters lulls thee now;
His arm no more will pillow thee,
Thy hand upon his brow;
He is not near, to hurt thee, or to save:
The ground is his--the sea must be thy grave."
DANA.
A long summer's evening did the body of Francesco Caraccioli hang
suspended at the yard-arm of the Minerva; a revolting spectacle to his
countrymen and to most of the strangers who had been the witnesses of
his end. Then was it lowered into a boat, its feet loaded with a
double-headed shot, and it was carried out a league or more into the bay
and cast into the sea.
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