ticular form of crime; he would venture to say that it had been
encouraged by an extreme leniency in many cases on the part of those
whose sacred duty it was to administer the law of the land. A sterner
and healthier spirit was called for at the present juncture. The time
had come to make an example, and a more suitable case than the one now
before him could not have been found for such a purpose. He would
accordingly hold out no hope of a reprieve, but would counsel prisoner
to make the best use of the short time remaining to him.

Johnnie standing in the dock appeared to the spectators to be in a
half-dazed condition--as dull and spiritless a clodhopper as they had
ever beheld. The judge and barristers, in their wigs and robes and
gowns, were unlike any human beings he had ever looked on. He might have
been transported to some other world, so strange did the whole scene
appear to him. He only knew, or surmised, that all these important
people were occupied in doing him to death, but the process, the meaning
of their fine phrases, he could not follow. He looked at them, his
glazed eyes travelling from face to face, to be fixed finally on the
judge, in a vacant stare; but he scarcely saw them, he was all the time
gazing on, and his mind occupied with, other forms and scenes invisible
to the court. His village, his Marty, his dear little playmate of long
ago, the sweet girl he had won, the wife and mother of his children,
with her white, terrified face, clinging to him and crying in anguish:
"Oh, Johnnie, what will they do to 'ee?" And all the time, with it all,
he saw the vast green slope of the down, with the Salisbury road lying
like a narrow white band across it, and close to it, near the summit,
the solitary old tree.

During the delivery of the sentence, and when he was led from the dock
and conveyed back to the prison, that image or vision was still present.
He sat staring at the wall of his cell as he had stared at the judge,
the fatal tree still before him. Never before had he seen it in that
vivid way in which it appeared to him now, standing alone on the vast
green down, under the wide sky, its four separate boles leaning a little
way from each other, like the middle ribs of an open fan, holding up the
widespread branches, the thin, open foliage, the green leaves stained
with rusty brown and purple; and the ivy, rising like a slender black
serpent of immense length, springing from the roots, winding upwards,