our say afterwards. At present, guilty or not guilty?"

I refused to plead at all; I was not the man. The third judge woke up,
and said hurriedly:

"That is a plea of not guilty, enter it as such." Then he went to sleep
again. The young girl on the bench beside him laughed joyously, and Mr.
Baron Garrow nodded round at her, then snapped viciously at me:

"You don't make your case any better by this sort of foolery." His eyes
glared at me like an awakened owl's.

I said, "I'm fighting for my neck... and you'll have to fight, too, to
get it."

The old judge said angrily, "Silence, or you will have to be removed."

I said, "I am fighting for my life."

There was a sort of buzz all round the court.

Lord Stowell said, "Yes, yes;" and then, "Now, Mr. King's Advocate, I
suppose Mr. Alfonso Jervis opens for you."

A dusty wig swam up from just below my left hand, almost to a level with
the dock.

The old judge shut his eyes, with an air of a man who _is_ going a
long journey in a post-chaise. Mr. Baron Garrow dipped his pen into an
invisible ink-pot, and scratched it on his desk. A long story began to
drone from under the wig, an interminable farrago of dull nonsense, in
a hypochondriacal voice; a long tale about piracy in general; piracy in
the times of the Greeks, piracy in the times of William the Conqueror...
_pirata nequissima Eustachio_, and thanking God that a case of the sort
had not been heard in that court for an immense lapse of years. Below
me was an array of wigs, on each side a compressed mass of humanity,
squeezed so tight that all the eyeballs seemed to be starting out of
the heads towards me. From the wig below, a translation of the florid
phrases of the Spanish papers was coming:

"His very Catholic Majesty, out of his great love for his ancient friend
and ally, his Britannic Majesty, did surrender the body of the notorious
El Demonio, called also..."

I began to wonder who had composed that precious document, whether it
was the _Juez de la Primera Instancia_, bending his yellow face and
sloe-black eyes above the paper, over there in Havana--or whether it was
O'Brien, who was dead since the writing.

All the while the barrister was droning on. I did not listen because
I had heard all that before--in the room of the Judge of the First
Instance at Havana. Suddenly appearing behind the backs of the row of
gentlefolk on the bench was the pale, thin face of my father. I wondered
which of his great