hat
might have been taken from those sensational newspapers written for
nursery-maids, and from which, he said, he could not find that Butler
had ever done one good thing in the whole course of his life. Of that
life of fifty years Butler had spent thirty-five in prison. The judge
expressed his regret that a man of Butler's knowledge, information,
vanity, and utter recklessness of what evil will do, could not be put
away somewhere for the rest of his life, and sentenced him to fifteen
years' imprisonment with hard labour. "An iniquitous and brutal
sentence!" exclaimed the prisoner. After a brief altercation with the
judge, who said that he could hardly express the scorn he felt for such
a man, Butler was removed. The judge subsequently reduced the sentence
to one of ten years. Chance or destiny would seem implacable in their
pursuit of Mr. William Munday of Toowong.

Butler after his trial admitted that it was he who had robbed the old
gentleman of his watch, and described to the police the house in which
it was hidden. When the police went there to search they found that the
house had been pulled down, but among the debris they discovered a brown
paper parcel containing the old gentleman's gold watch and chain, a
five-chambered revolver, a keen-edged butcher's knife, and a mask.

Butler served his term of imprisonment in Victoria, "an unmitigated
nuisance" to his custodians. On his release in 1904, he made, as in
Dunedin, an attempt to earn a living by his pen. He contributed some
articles to a Melbourne evening paper on the inconveniences of prison
discipline, but he was quite unfitted for any sustained effort as a
journalist. According to his own account, with the little money he had
left he made his way to Sydney, thence to Brisbane. He was half-starved,
bewildered, despairing; in his own words, "if a psychological camera
could have been turned on me it would have shown me like a bird
fascinated by a serpent, fascinated and bewildered by the fate in front,
behind, and around me." Months of suffering and privation passed, months
of tramping hundreds of miles with occasional breakdowns, months of
hunger and sickness; "my actions had become those of a fool; my mind and
will had become a remnant guided or misguided by unreasoning impulse."

It was under the influence of such an impulse that on March 23 Butler
had met and shot Mr. Munday at Toowong. On May 24 he was arraigned at
Brisbane before the Supreme Court of Que