with calmness and good temper. And yet Botany Bay,
with its attendant horrors, was already fading from her memory. In
imagination she was still with her incomparable hero, and it was her
solace, after fifteen years, to sing the praise and echo the perfections
of Sixteen-String Jack.

'How well I remember,' she would murmur, as though unconscious of her
audience, 'the unhappy day when Jack Rann was first arrested.

It was May, and he came back travel-stained and weary in the brilliant
dawn. He had stopped a one-horse shay near the nine-mile stone on the
Hounslow Road--every word of his confession is burnt into my brain--and
had taken a watch and a handful of guineas. I was glad enough of the
money, for there was no penny in the house, and presently I sent the
maid-servant to make the best bargain she could with the watch. But the
silly jade, by the saddest of mishaps, took the trinket straight to the
very man who made it, and he, suspecting a theft, had us both arrested.
Even then Jack might have been safe, had not the devil prompted me to
speak the truth. Dismayed by the magistrate, I owned, wretched woman
that I was, that I had received the watch from Rann, and in two hours
Jack also was under lock and key. Yet, when we were sent for trial
I made what amends I could. I declared on oath that I had never seen
Sixteen-String Jack in my life; his name came to my lips by accident;
and, hector as they would, the lawyers could not frighten me to an
acknowledgment. Meanwhile Jack's own behaviour was grand. I was the
proudest woman in England as I stood by his side in the dock. When you
compared him with Sir John Fielding, you did not doubt for an instant
which was the finer gentleman. And what a dandy was my Jack! Though he
came there to answer for his life, he was all ribbons and furbelows. His
irons were tied up with the daintiest blue bows, and in the breast of
his coat he carried a bundle of flowers as large as a birch-broom. His
neck quivered in the noose, yet he was never cowed to civility. 'I know
no more of the matter than you do,' he cried indignantly, 'nor half so
much neither,' and if the magistrate had not been an ill-mannered oaf,
he would not have dared to disbelieve my true-hearted Jack. That time
we escaped with whole skins; and off we went, after dinner, to Vauxhall,
where Jack was more noticed than the fiercest of the bloods, and where
he filled the heart of George Barrington with envy. Nor was he idle,
desp