tenant, and conducts a
mock funeral to the chapel of Utragan. A skirmish takes place on the
road between the revenue officers and the mourners suborned by le
Harnois and Nicholas. You have acknowledged that you were present at
that skirmish; and we have witnesses who can prove that you were both
present and armed with a cudgel of unusual dimensions: in fact,"
said the magistrate by way of parenthesis, "of monstrous dimensions:"
(here the prisoner could not forbear smiling, which did him no service
with the magistrate; who went on to aggravate the enormity of the
cudgel;)--"a cudgel in fact, such as no man carries, no man ever did
carry, no man ever will carry with peaceable intentions. Nicholas is
known to have gone on from Utragan to Ap Gauvon: you admit that you
were there, and without any adequate motive; for as to the picturesque
and all that, on a night such as the last, it is really unworthy of you
to allege any thing so idle. At Ap Gauvon you are apprehended and
immediately rescued. You steal away into the barn of a peasant, and
kill the dog to prevent detection from his barking. Your footsteps
however are tracked: you are again apprehended on the following
morning: and again an attempt is made to rescue you: and a riot
absolutely raised in your behalf. And finally, when it became known
last night that you were conveyed to Walladmor, a smuggling vessel was
observed to stand in close to the shore--making signals for upwards of
five hours which no doubt were directed to you. The chain of
circumstantial evidence is complete."

Bertram was silent: he could not but acknowledge to himself that the
presumptions were strong against him. Omitting the accidental
coincidences between his own movements and those of Nicholas, whence
had he--a perfect stranger by his own account--drawn the zealous
assistance which he had received? By what means could he have obtained
such earnest and continued support?--He would have suggested to the
magistrate that the same mistake about his person, which had led to his
apprehension, was in fact the main cause (combined with the general
dislike to Alderman Gravesand) of the second mistake under which the
mob had acted in attempting his rescue. But dejection at the mass of
presumptions arrayed against himself, even apart from his own
unfortunate resemblance to the real object of those presumptions,
self-reproach on account of his own indiscretion, and pain of mind at
the prospect of the troub