to a North Briton; his legs are crossed, his feet rest upon a monstrous fender, which he takes care to inform us he has received from England, as he sits sipping his "sherri port bier," and soliloquizing pleasantly over the various chances of his life. He is just about to finish his evening with some "croc," the English name for the pleasant invention of Admiral Grogram; his servant enters, to announce that the chief executioner with a file of soldiers have just dropped in, to say a word on a matter of business from the Empress.
The awful functionary, on stalking into the room, exclaimed, "I am come – "
"Well, I see you are," replied the banker, trying to be facetious, but feeling like a man with a sudden attack of ague.
"By command of the Empress!"
"Long may she live!" ejaculates Sutherland, heartily.
"It is really a very delicate affair," says the executioner; who, like the French Samson, is a humane man; "and I do not know how to break it to you."
"Oh, pray, don't hesitate. What would you like to take?" asked the banker, spilling the grog he tried to hand to the horrid functionary, from sheer fright.
The Envoy shakes his head grimly. "It is what we must all come to some day," he adds, after a short pause.
"What is? In Heaven's name do not keep me longer in suspense!" cries the banker, his very visible knees knocking together with agonizing rapidity.
"I have been sent," answers the awful messenger; again he stops – looks compassionately at his destined victim.
"Well!"
"By the Empress – "
"I know!"
"To have you – "
"What?"
"Stuffed!" said the Executioner mournfully.
The banker shrieked.
"Stuffed!" repeats the man, laconically, pointing to a bird in a glass case, to prevent there being any mistake in Sutherland's mind as to the nature of the operation he is to be called upon to undergo.
The Executioner now lays his hand significantly on poor Sutherland's collar, and looks into his face, as if to inquire if he had any particular or peculiar fancy as to the mode in which he would like to go through the preparatory operation of being killed.
"I have brought the straw," he says, "and two assistants are without. The Empress can not wait; and we have not got your measure for the glass case yet."
The banker looks the very picture of abject misery; but Britons, in foreign comedies, are always ready to buy every thing, and the banker had lived long enough in Russia to know the value of a bribe. He therefore offers one so considerable, that his grim visitor is touched, and endeavors to lull his sense of duty to sleep by a sophistry.
"I was told, indeed, to have you stuffed," he reasons, "and got ready for the Empress; but nothing was said about time; so I don't mind giving you half an hour if you can satisfy these gentlemen" – and he turns to his associates.
It is briefly done. The banker pays like a man whose life depends on his liberality – we suppose several millions – for the Executioner remarks that he can not forget that a groom in England frequently receives several thousands sterling a year; this is a very prevalent idea among the Frankish and Teutonic nations of the Continent. We once heard a Spanish general assert, in a large assembly, that the usual pay of an English ensign was five hundred pounds a month, an idea doubtless derived from some Iberian dramatist; and therefore a public functionary like the Executioner must be remunerated proportionably higher. The enormous pecuniary sacrifice gets for Sutherland some half-hour's respite; which he wisely uses by flying to the British embassador, Sir Bifstik, and awaits the result with great anguish.
Sir Bifstik goes to the Empress. He is admitted. He asks if Her Majesty be aware of the position of a British subject named Sutherland?
"Excellent man," says Her Majesty, "No! What is it?"
Sir Bifstik bows low at the tones of the Imperial voice, and now begins to explain himself with something more than diplomatic haste; thinking, perhaps, that already the fatal straw may be filling the banker's members.
Imperial Catherine does not, of course, consider the putting to death of a mere Scotch banker, and making him in reality what some of his brethren are sometimes called figuratively – a man of straw – worth this fuss; and sets the embassador down in her mind as a person of wild republican ideas, who ought to be recalled as soon as possible by his government, and placed under proper surveillance; but, nevertheless, she causes some inquiries to be made, and learns that it is in consequence of her having ordered "Sutherland" to be stuffed that he is probably then undergoing that operation.
Sir Bifstik expresses such horror and consternation at this intelligence, that the Empress believes his mind to be disordered.
"What possible consequence can the accidental stuffing of a Scotch banker be to you, milor?" she saith.
"The ac-ci-den-t-al stuff-ings of a Scotcher Bankers!" in a German idiom not generally used by our nobility, gasps Sir Bifstik, mechanically, with pale lips and bristling hair.
"Take him away! He is mad!" screams the Empress, thinking that no sane person could be concerned about such a trifling affair, and in another moment the most sacred of international laws would have been violated (on the stage), and Great Britain insulted by profane hands being laid on the person of her embassador, when all at once a light breaks over the mind of Her Majesty – the recalling of something forgotten. She exclaims, with a Russian nonchalance quite cheering to behold, "Oh, I remember; now it is easily explained. My poor little dog (I had forgotten him too) died yesterday, and I wished his body to be preserved. Cher chien! His name was the same as that of the banker, I think. Alas that cruel Death should take my dog!"
"But Mr. Sutherland has, perhaps, already been murdered!" gasps the embassador. "I pray that your Majesty will lose no time in having him released, should he be still alive!"
"Ah, true! I never thought of that," returns the Empress.
The order is finally issued, and Sutherland rescued, just as the Executioner, grown angry at his unreasonable remonstrances, resolves to delay no longer in executing the Imperial commands. To put the coup-de-grace on the comic agony of the poor banker, his immense red crop of hair has, in that half hour of frightful uncertainty, turned white as snow!
THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONISTS, MARAT, ROBESPIERRE, AND DANTON
One obvious effect of the upheavings of a revolution is to develop latent power, and to deliver into light and influence cast down and crushed giants, such as Danton. But another result is the undue prominence given by convulsion and anarchy to essentially small and meagre spirits, who, like little men lifted up from their feet, in the pressure of a crowd, are surprised into sudden exaltation, to be trodden down whenever their precarious propping gives way. Revolution is a genuine leveler: "small and great" meet on equal terms in its wide grave; and persons, whose names would otherwise have never met in any other document than a directory, are coupled together continually, divide influence, have their respective partisans, and require the stern alembic of death to separate them, and to settle their true positions in the general history of the nation and the world.
Nothing, indeed, has tended to deceive and mystify the public mind more than the arbitrary conjunction of names. The
