ntic gallows beside the road; it stood three-sided, and
from each of its three broad beams at top depended in chains some eight
or ten bodies, from several of which the cere-clothes had dropped away,
leaving the skeletons swinging lightly by their chains. A tall ladder
reached to the summit of the structure, and on the peat beneath lay
bones.

On top of the dark transverse beam facing the road, from which, as from
the other two completing the triangle of death, dangled a row of these
unfortunates in chains, a hangman, with a pipe in his mouth, much as we
see him in the famous print of the "Idle Apprentice," though here his
perch was ever so much higher, was reclining at his ease and listlessly
shying bones, from a little heap at his elbow, at the skeletons that
hung round, bringing down now a rib or two, now a hand, now half a leg.
A long-sighted man could have discerned that he was a dark fellow, lean;
and from continually looking down on the earth from the elevation over
which, in another sense, he always hung, his nose, his lips, his chin
were pendulous and loose, and drawn down into a monstrous grotesque.

This fellow took his pipe from his mouth on seeing the coach, stood up,
and cut some solemn capers high on his beam, and shook a new rope in the
air, crying with a voice high and distant as the caw of a raven hovering
over a gibbet, "A robe for Judge Harbottle!"

The coach was now driving on at its old swift pace.

So high a gallows as that, the Judge had never, even in his most
hilarious moments, dreamed of. He thought, he must be raving. And the
dead footman! He shook his ears and strained his eyelids; but if he was
dreaming, he was unable to awake himself.

There was no good in threatening these scoundrels. A _brutum fulmen_
might bring a real one on his head.

Any submission to get out of their hands; and then heaven and earth he
would move to unearth and hunt them down.

Suddenly they drove round a corner of a vast white building, and under a
_porte-cochere_.

CHAPTER VII

_Chief-Justice Twofold_

The Judge found himself in a corridor lighted with dingy oil lamps, the
walls of bare stone; it looked like a passage in a prison. His guards
placed him in the hands of other people. Here and there he saw bony and
gigantic soldiers passing to and fro, with muskets over their shoulders.
They looked straight before them, grinding their teeth, in bleak fury,
with no noise but the clank of their sh