It was an immemorial custom in England to tar smugglers.  They were hanged on the seaboard, coated over with pitch and left swinging.  Examples must be made in public, and tarred examples last longest.  The tar was mercy:  by renewing it they were spared making too many fresh examples.  They placed gibbets from point to point along the coast, as nowadays they do beacons.  The hanged man did duty as a lantern.  After his fashion, he guided his comrades, the smugglers.  The smugglers from far out at sea perceived the gibbets.  There is one, first warning; another, second warning.  It did not stop smuggling; but public order is made up of such things.  The fashion lasted in England up to the beginning of this century.  In 1822 three men were still to be seen hanging in front of Dover Castle.  But, for that matter, the preserving process was employed not only with smugglers.  England turned robbers, incendiaries, and murderers to the same account.  Jack Painter, who set fire to the government storehouses at Portsmouth, was hanged and tarred in 1776.  L’Abbe Coyer, who describes him as Jean le Peintre, saw him again in 1777.  Jack Painter was hanging above the ruin he had made, and was re-tarred from time to time.  His corpse lasted—­I had almost said lived—­nearly fourteen years.  It was still doing good service in 1788; in 1790, however, they were obliged to replace it by another.  The Egyptians used to value the mummy of the king; a plebeian mummy can also, it appears, be of service.

The wind, having great power on the hill, had swept it of all its snow.  Herbage reappeared on it, interspersed here and there with a few thistles; the hill was covered by that close short grass which grows by the sea, and causes the tops of cliffs to resemble green cloth.  Under the gibbet, on the very spot over which hung the feet of the executed criminal, was a long and thick tuft, uncommon on such poor soil.  Corpses, crumbling there for centuries past, accounted for the beauty of the grass.  Earth feeds on man.

A dreary fascination held the child; he remained there open-mouthed.  He only dropped his head a moment when a nettle, which felt like an insect, stung his leg; then he looked up again—­he looked above him at the face which looked down on him.  It appeared to regard him the more steadfastly because it had no eyes.  It was a comprehensive glance, having an indescribable fixedness in which there were both light and darkness, and which emanated from the skull and teeth, as well as the empty arches of the brow.  The whole head of a dead man seems to have vision, and this is awful.  No eyeball, yet we feel that we are looked at.  A horror of worms.

Little by little the child himself was becoming an object of terror.  He no longer moved.  Torpor was coming over him.  He did not perceive that he was losing consciousness—­he was becoming benumbed and lifeless.  Winter was silently delivering him over to night.  There is something of the traitor in winter.  The child was all but a statue.  The coldness of stone was penetrating his bones; darkness, that reptile, was crawling over him.  The drowsiness resulting from snow creeps over a man like a dim tide.  The child was being slowly invaded by a stagnation resembling that of the corpse.  He was falling asleep.