example. The
enormity of Read's crime rendered him a proper example, and he would
therefore hold out no hope of mercy towards him.' As to the plea of
guilty, he remarked that nowadays too many persons pleaded guilty,
deluded with the hope that it would be taken into consideration and they
would escape the severer penalty. He was determined to put a stop to
that sort of thing; if Read had not pleaded guilty no doubt some
extenuating circumstance would have come up during the trial and he
would have saved his life.

"There, if ever, spoke the 'human devil' in a black cap!

"I find another case of a sentence of transportation for life on a youth
of 18, named Edward Baker, for stealing a pocket-handkerchief. Had he
pleaded guilty it might have been worse for him.

"At the Salisbury Spring Assizes, 1830, Mr. Justice Gazalee, addressing
the grand jury, said that none of the crimes appeared to be marked with
circumstances of great moral turpitude. The prisoners numbered 130; he
passed sentences of death on twenty-nine, life transportations on five,
fourteen years on five, seven years on eleven, and various terms of hard
labour on the others." (_A Shepherd's Life_, pp. 241-4.)

Johnnie Budd was done to death before my principal informants, one 89
years old, the other 93, were born; but in their early years they knew
the widow and her three children, and had known them and their children
all their lives; thus the whole story of Johnnie and Marty was familiar
to them. Now, when I thought of Johnnie's case and how he was treated at
the trial, as it was told me by these old people, it struck me as so
like that of the poor young man Read, who was hanged because he pleaded
guilty, that I at once came to the belief that it was Mr. Justice Park
who had tried him. I have accordingly searched the newspapers of that
day, but have failed to find Johnnie's case. I can only suppose that
this particular case was probably considered too unimportant to be
reported at large in the newspapers of 1821. He was just one of a number
convicted and sentenced to capital punishment.

When Johnnie was hanged his poor wife travelled to Salisbury and
succeeded in getting permission to take the body back to the village for
burial. How she in her poverty, with her three little children to keep,
managed it I don't know. Probably some of the other poor villagers who
pitied and perhaps loved her helped her to do it. She did even more: she
had a grave-stone