en
office, sitting at a table, with a huge Bible before him, absorbed in
spiritual reading. He wore spectacles on his Roman nose, had a long
grey beard, quoted Scripture to chance passengers, and was very
earnest for their salvation. He was atoning for the sins of his
youth by leading the life of a hermit by praying and cheating. He
has had many followers. He made mistakes in his cash, which for a
while were overlooked in so good a man, but they became at length so
serious that he lost his billet. He had for some time been spoken of
by his friends and admirers as "Mr. Nicholas," but after his last
mistakes had been discovered, he began to be known merely as "Old
Nick the Lawyer," or "Old Nick the Liar," which some ignorant people
look upon as convertible terms. I think Lizard Skin, the cannibal,
was a better Christian than old Nick the lawyer, as he was brave and
honest, and scorned to tell a lie.

The convict counsel for the four seamen defended them at a great
expenditure of learning and lies. He argued at great length:--
"That there was no evidence that a master mariner named Blogg ever
existed; that he was an outlaw, and, as such, every British subject
had an inchoate right to kill him at sight, and, therefore, that the
seamen, supposing for the sake of argument that they did kill him,
acted strictly within their legal rights; that Blogg drowned himself
in a fit of delirium tremens, after being drunk on rum three days and
nights consecutively; that he fell overboard accidentally and was
drowned; that the cook and mate threw him overboard, and then laid
the blame on the innocent seamen; that Blogg swam ashore, and was now
living on an unchartered island; that if he was murdered, his body
had not been found: there could be no murder without a corpse; and
finally, he would respectfully submit to that honourable court, that
the case bristled with ineradicable difficulties."

The seamen would have been sent to the gallows in any case, but
Nicholas' speech made their fate inevitable. The court brushed aside
the legal bristles, and hanged the four seamen on the evidence of the
mate and the cook.

The tragedy of the gallows was followed by a short afterpiece. Jim
Parrish, Ned Tomlins, and every whaler and foremast man in Hobart
Town and on the Tamar, discussed the evidence both drunk and sober,
and the opinion was universal that the cook ought to have sworn an
oath strong enough to go through a three-inch slab