idly-sensitive nature, such irony seemed an aggravation of all he
had endured. To think that, after such experiences as had fallen to his
share, a Family Compact judge should gravely inform him that in Upper
Canada the administrators of the law should be no respecters of persons!
that justice is even-handed! To think that such an one should presume to
advise him to become practical, with a view to wealth and happiness! It
was like the adulterous woman who, on eloping with her paramour, wrote
to her husband enjoining him to be virtuous if he would be happy. The
incongruity struck the prisoner so forcibly that for a moment he was on
the verge of another explosion of sardonic laughter. Before leaving the
dock he made one last attempt to draw attention to the treatment he had
sustained while in prison. By way of heightening the effect of his
narration, he informed the Court that his letters had been suppressed by
the sheriff:[18] that while his enemies had been allowed to fill the
newspapers with lying diatribes against him, and to prejudice the public
mind in view of his impending trial, his own letters to the Niagara
_Spectator_ had been rigidly withheld from the light of day, and this
by official interference. Chief Justice Powell put the cap-sheaf upon
the pinnacle of absurdity by informing him that if he chose he might
prosecute the sheriff. Prosecute the sheriff! when he had just been
sentenced by the Chief Justice himself to leave the Province within
twenty-four hours, and when he was liable to the last penalty of the law
in case of his return to prosecute!

The trial was ended, and--blissful thought!--for the ensuing twenty-four
hours he was free to come and go whithersoever he would. He was taken in
charge by his friends the Hamiltons, and spent the night in their house
at Queenston. Next day--Saturday, the 21st of August--he obeyed the
mandate of the law, and shook from his feet the parched dust of Upper
Canadian soil. His mental condition was far from satisfactory, but he
would brook no interference with his actions, even from his best
friends. The feeling uppermost in his bosom was a delicious sense of
being at large, with no one to shut the cell door upon him, or otherwise
to control his actions. He felt like one recalled to life. The unhappy
man was well aware that his brain was weak, but he also knew that he was
not what is ordinarily understood as insane. Like Baldassarre, he
carried within him that piteous s