cross the corner of the Basin, and strike in
the door just above his brother's head. This one did not lose an
instant; while the axe still quivered in the wood, he hurled himself
upon the drunkard, and did that justice on him which he would not ask
from the law, perhaps because it was a family affair; perhaps because
those wretched men were no more under the law than the boys were.

I do not mean that there was no law for the boys, for it was manifest to
their terror in two officers whom they knew as constables, and who may
have reigned one after another, or together, with full power of life and
death over them, as they felt; but who in a community mainly so peaceful
acted upon Dogberry's advice, and made and meddled with rogues as little
as they could. From time to time it was known among the boys that you
would be taken up if you went in swimming inside of the corporation
line, and for a while they would be careful to keep beyond it; but this
could not last; they were soon back in the old places, and I suppose no
arrests were ever really made. They did, indeed, hear once that Old
Griffin, as they called him, caught a certain boy in the river before
dark, and carried him up through the town to his own home naked. Of
course no such thing ever happened; but the boys believed it, and it
froze my boy's soul with fear; all the more because this constable was a
cabinet-maker and made coffins; from his father's printing-office the
boy could hear the long slide of his plane over the wood, and he could
smell the varnish on the boards.

I dare say Old Griffin was a kindly man enough, and not very old; and I
suppose that the other constable, as known to his family and friends,
was not at all the gloomy headsman he appeared to the boys. When he
became constable (they had not the least notion how a man became
constable) they heard that his rule was to be marked by unwonted
severity against the crime of going in swimming inside the corporation
line, and so they kept strictly to the letter of the law. But one day
some of them found themselves in the water beyond the First Lock, when
the constable appeared on the tow-path, suddenly, as if he and his horse
had come up out of the ground. He told them that he had got them now,
and he ordered them to come along with him; he remained there amusing
himself with their tears, their prayers, and then vanished again. Heaven
knows how they lived through it; but they must have got safely home in