Clarke Courier

A Weird Ceremony.

A hundred years or so ago a public executioner, or headsman, was a pitiful creature indeed. Shunned by his kind, he led a solitary life; no man would speak to him, or even brush against him in passing. A little girl in old Dusseldorf, known as Red Sefchen from her long red locks, once told the poet Heine of a strange scene she had witnessed. She came of a long race of executioners, and lived with her grandfather, a famous headsman, in a lonely wood.

When she was about eight years old, on one fine autumn day an unusually large party of guests arrived at the farmhouse.

There were more than a dozen of them, almost all very old men with gray or bald heads; and under their red cloaks they had their long swords and their finest clothes.

They were the oldest executioners from all the most distant parts, and had not met for a long time. There was a great shaking of hands, but very little speech, and that often in a language of unintelligible signs.

When night fell, the master turned his servants out-of-doors, and sent the old women off on some pretext. But he let Red Sefchen stay in the house, and bade her scour the great silver goblet with its sea-gods and their dolphins and conch-shells, and put it on the table outside the front door; then he told her to go at once to bed.

Red Sefchen dutifully cleaned the Neptune cup, and set it on the table by the flasks of wine, but she did not go to bed. She was so curious that she hid behind a bush, where she could not hear much, but could see all that happened.

The strangers, with her grandfather at their head, came solemnly, two and two, and sat down on the wooden blocks round the stone table; and the pine torches cast a sinister light on their stern faces.

For a long time they sat in silence or only muttering, as if in prayer. Then her grandfather filled the goblet with wine, and each drank and passed it to his neighbor; and after each draught they shook hands heartily.

Then the grandfather made a speech, apparently on some sad topic, for big drops fell from his eyes, and the other old men wept bitterly; and it was dreadful to see those old men, who looked as hard and weather beaten as the stone faces round a church door, with tears running from their stoney eyes, and sobbing like children. The little listener's heart was ready to burst with pity.

At last all rose from their seats and cast off their red mantles. Each took his long sword under his arm, and two by two they walked to a tree, under which a spade lay ready, and with it one of them quickly dug a deep grave. Then Sefchen's grandfather drew near; but he had not put aside his cloak like the others, and from beneath it he drew a package, long and narrow, wrapped in a sheet. This he laid with great care in the grave, and hastily covered it.

Poor Sefchen's hair rose in horror at this secret burial. She ran to her chamber and hid beneath the bedclothes, and at last fell asleep. The next morning all seemed like a dream, but the freshly-dug earth beneath the tree showed her that it was real.

But she told no one of the night's doings, and as years went on it began to fade from her memory.

When her grandfather died, five years after, she ventured to open her heart to her aunt, who seemed neither surprised nor shocked. She told the child that the buried object was her grandfather's old sword of justice, with which he had beheaded a hundred poor sinners; and that it was the custom for a headsman, when he had performed a hundred executions with one sword, to use it no longer, for it had acquired a soul through its long years of service, and must finally be laid to rest in a grave, like a human being. And thus was this strange scene explained.