farm labourer, who came to his end in
1821, a year or so before my old friend Malachi was born. It is going
very far back, but there were circumstances in his life which made a
deep impression on the mind of that little community, and the story had
lived on through all these years.

II

Johnnie had fallen on hard times when in an exceptionally severe winter
season he with others had been thrown out of employment at the farm
where he worked; then with a wife and three small children to keep he
had in his desperation procured food for them one dark night in an
adjacent field. But alas! one of the little ones playing in the road
with some of her companions, who were all very hungry, let it out that
she wasn't hungry, that for three days she had had as much nice meat as
she wanted to eat! Play over, the hungry little ones flew home to tell
their parents the wonderful news--why didn't they have nice meat like
Tilly Budd, instead of a piece of rye bread without even dripping on it,
when they were so hungry? Much talk followed, and spread from cottage to
cottage until it reached the constable's ears, and he, already informed
of the loss of a wether taken from its fold close by, went straight to
Johnnie and charged him with the offence. Johnnie lost his head, and
dropping on his knees confessed his guilt and begged his old friend
Lampard to have mercy on him and to overlook it for the sake of his wife
and children.

It was his first offence, but when he was taken from the lock-up at the
top of the village street to be conveyed to Salisbury, his friends and
neighbours who had gathered at the spot to witness his removal shook
their heads and doubted that Ingden would ever see him again. The
confession had made the case so simple a one that he had at once been
committed to take his trial at the Salisbury Assizes, and as the time
was near the constable had been ordered to convey the prisoner to the
town himself. Accordingly he engaged old Joe Blaskett, called Daddy in
the village, to take them in his pony cart. Daddy did not want the job,
but was talked or bullied into it, and there he now sat in his cart,
waiting in glum silence for his passengers; a bent old man of eighty,
with a lean, grey, bitter face, in his rusty cloak, his old rabbit-skin
cap drawn down over his ears, his white disorderly beard scattered over
his chest. The constable Lampard was a big, powerful man, with a great
round, good-natured face, but just