ese arrangements perfected, they drove to the justice-room with all
speed, followed by the notary and his two friends in another coach. Mr
Chuckster alone was left behind--greatly to his indignation; for he
held the evidence he could have given, relative to Kit's returning to
work out the shilling, to be so very material as bearing upon his
hypocritical and designing character, that he considered its
suppression little better than a compromise of felony.

At the justice-room, they found the single gentleman, who had gone
straight there, and was expecting them with desperate impatience. But
not fifty single gentlemen rolled into one could have helped poor Kit,
who in half an hour afterwards was committed for trial, and was assured
by a friendly officer on his way to prison that there was no occasion
to be cast down, for the sessions would soon be on, and he would, in
all likelihood, get his little affair disposed of, and be comfortably
transported, in less than a fortnight.

CHAPTER 61

Let moralists and philosophers say what they may, it is very
questionable whether a guilty man would have felt half as much misery
that night, as Kit did, being innocent. The world, being in the
constant commission of vast quantities of injustice, is a little too
apt to comfort itself with the idea that if the victim of its falsehood
and malice have a clear conscience, he cannot fail to be sustained
under his trials, and somehow or other to come right at last; 'in which
case,' say they who have hunted him down, '--though we certainly don't
expect it--nobody will be better pleased than we.' Whereas, the world
would do well to reflect, that injustice is in itself, to every
generous and properly constituted mind, an injury, of all others the
most insufferable, the most torturing, and the most hard to bear; and
that many clear consciences have gone to their account elsewhere, and
many sound hearts have broken, because of this very reason; the
knowledge of their own deserts only aggravating their sufferings, and
rendering them the less endurable.

The world, however, was not in fault in Kit's case. But Kit was
innocent; and knowing this, and feeling that his best friends deemed
him guilty--that Mr and Mrs Garland would look upon him as a monster of
ingratitude--that Barbara would associate him with all that was bad and
criminal--that the pony would consider himself forsaken--and that even
his own mother might perhaps yield to th