f a
flock of sheep. The Court was crowded, for the case against the Blacks
had made a prodigious stir; and the King's Attorney, the most furious
Person for talking a Fellow-creature's Life away that ever I remember to
have seen or heard, came down especially from London to prosecute us.
Neither he nor His Lordship the Judge, in his charge to the Grand Jury,
had any but the worst of words to give us; and folks began to say that
this would be another Bloody Assize; that the Shire Hall had need to be
hung with scarlet, as when Jeffreys was on the bench; and that as short
work would be made of us as of the Rebels in the West. And I did not
much care, for I was sick of lying in hold, amidst Evil Odours, and with
a green wound. It came even to whispering that one of us at least would
be made a Gibbeting-in-chains example for killing the Grenadier, if that
Act could be fixed on any particular Black. And half in jest, half in
earnest, the Woman-Keeper told me on the morning of the Assizes that,
young as I was (not yet twelve years of age), my bones might rattle in a
birdcage in the midst of Charlwood Chase; for if I could brain one
Grenadier, I could kill another. But yet, being so weary of the Life, I
did not much Care.

It was still somewhat of a Relief to me to come into the Dock, and look
upon State and Rich Clothes (in which I have always taken a
Gentleman-like pleasure), in the stead of all the dirt and squalor which
for so long had been my surrounding. There were the Judges all ranged, a
Terrible show, in their brave Scarlet Robes and Fur Tippets, with great
monstrous Wigs, and the King's Arms behind them under a Canopy, done in
Carver's work, gilt. They frowned on us dreadfully when we came trooping
into the Dock, bringing all manner of Deadly pestilential Fumes with us
from the Gaol yonder, and which not all the rue, rosemary, and marjoram
strewn on the Dock-ledge, nor the hot vinegar sprinkled about the Court,
could mitigate. The middle Judge, who was old, and had a split lip and a
fang protruding from it, shook his head at me, and put on such an Awful
face, that for a moment my scared thoughts went back to the Clergyman at
St. George's, Hanover Square, that was wont to be so angry with me in
his Sermons. Ah, how different was the lamentable Hole in the which I
now found myself cheek by jowl with Felons and Caravats, to the great
red-baize Pew in which I had sat so often a Little Gentleman! He to the
right of the midd