bright yellow caste-mark above the bridge of his
nose,--sat in pompous immobility: only his eyes glittered, rolling
in the gloom, and the nostrils dilated and collapsed violently as he
breathed. Brierly dropped into his seat looking done up, as though
he had spent the night in sprinting on a cinder-track. The pious
sailing-ship skipper appeared excited and made uneasy movements, as
if restraining with difficulty an impulse to stand up and exhort
us earnestly to prayer and repentance. The head of the magistrate,
delicately pale under the neatly arranged hair, resembled the head of a
hopeless invalid after he had been washed and brushed and propped up in
bed. He moved aside the vase of flowers--a bunch of purple with a few
pink blossoms on long stalks--and seizing in both hands a long sheet of
bluish paper, ran his eye over it, propped his forearms on the edge of
the desk, and began to read aloud in an even, distinct, and careless
voice.

'By Jove! For all my foolishness about scaffolds and heads rolling
off--I assure you it was infinitely worse than a beheading. A heavy
sense of finality brooded over all this, unrelieved by the hope of rest
and safety following the fall of the axe. These proceedings had all the
cold vengefulness of a death-sentence, and the cruelty of a sentence of
exile. This is how I looked at it that morning--and even now I seem to
see an undeniable vestige of truth in that exaggerated view of a common
occurrence. You may imagine how strongly I felt this at the time.
Perhaps it is for that reason that I could not bring myself to admit
the finality. The thing was always with me, I was always eager to take
opinion on it, as though it had not been practically settled: individual
opinion--international opinion--by Jove! That Frenchman's, for instance.
His own country's pronouncement was uttered in the passionless and
definite phraseology a machine would use, if machines could speak. The
head of the magistrate was half hidden by the paper, his brow was like
alabaster.

'There were several questions before the court. The first as to whether
the ship was in every respect fit and seaworthy for the voyage. The
court found she was not. The next point, I remember, was, whether up
to the time of the accident the ship had been navigated with proper and
seamanlike care. They said Yes to that, goodness knows why, and then
they declared that there was no evidence to show the exact cause of
the accident. A floating