hey required me to strip
myself perfectly naked, that they might examine whether I had bank-notes
concealed any where about my person. They took up the detached parcels
of my miserable attire as I threw it from me, and felt them one by one,
to discover whether the articles of which they were in search might by
any device be sewn up in them. To all this I submitted without
murmuring. It might probably come to the same thing at last; and summary
justice was sufficiently coincident with my views, my principal object
being to get as soon as possible out of the clutches of the respectable
persons who now had me in custody.

This operation was scarcely completed, before we were directed to be
ushered into his worship's apartment. My accusers opened the charge, and
told him they had been ordered to this town, upon an intimation that one
of the persons who robbed the Edinburgh mail was to be found here; and
that they had taken me on board a vessel which was by this time under
sail for Ireland. "Well," says his worship, "that is your story; now let
us hear what account the gentleman gives of himself. What is your
name--ha, sirrah? and from what part of Tipperary are you pleased to
come?" I had already taken my determination upon this article; and the
moment I learned the particulars of the charge against me, resolved, for
the present at least, to lay aside my Irish accent, and speak my native
tongue. This I had done in the very few words I had spoken to my
conductors in the anti-room: they started at the metamorphosis; but they
had gone too far for it to be possible they should retract, in
consistence with their honour. I now told the justice that I was no
Irishman, nor had ever been in that country: I was a native of England.
This occasioned a consulting of the deposition in which my person was
supposed to be described, and which my conductors had brought with them
for their direction. To be sure, that required that the offender should
be an Irishman.

Observing his worship hesitate, I thought this was the time to push the
matter a little further. I referred to the paper, and showed that the
description neither tallied as to height nor complexion. But then it did
as to years and the colour of the hair; and it was not this gentleman's
habit, as he informed me, to squabble about trifles, or to let a man's
neck out of the halter for a pretended flaw of a few inches in his
stature. "If a man were too short," he said, "there was no