On Thursday, October Twenty-ninth, Sixteen Hundred Eighteen, at the Tower of London, the curtain fell on the fifth act of the life of Sir Walter Raleigh. It was a public holiday for all London.
The morning was cold and foggy.
Sir Walter was kept standing on the scaffold while the headsman ground his axe, the delay being for the amusement and edification of the people assembled. The High Sheriff approached the man who was so soon to die, and asked if there was not some last message he wished to send to some one. Sir Walter took from his neck a gold chain and locket. He handed them to the Sheriff and said, "Send these by a trusty messenger to Virginia Dare by the first ship that sails for the New World."
Sir Walter's frame shook in the cold, dank fog, and the Sheriff offered to bring a brazier of coals, but the great man proudly drew his cloak about him and said: "It is the ague I contracted in America. I will soon be cured of it!" And he laid his proud head, gray in the service of his country, calmly on the block, as if to say, "There now, take that, it is all I have left to give!"