ck, and greatly tickled Major
Trenton, who repeated it to the other officers, and one day young Mr
Moore of the 102nd, who was clever at such things, made a sketch of
the cleric as he appeared when preaching, which set them all a-laughing
immoderately.

'God alive!' cried old Major Trenton, holding the picture in his left
hand, and bringing down his right upon the table with a thump that set
all the glasses jingling, ''tis a perfect likeness of him, and yet,
Moore, if ye had but given him a judge's wig and robes instead of a
cassock, he would be the double of damned old hanging Norbury up there,'
pointing to the picture of an Irish judge which hung on the wall.
'Come,' he added, 'Mrs Egerton must see this. I know our hostess loves
the gentle parson.'

So three or four of them, still laughing boisterously, left the table to
look for my mother, whom they found sitting on the latticed-in verandah,
which on hot summer days was used as a drawing-room. She, too, laughed
heartily at the sketch, and said 'twas wonderfully drawn, and then
my brother Harry asked Mr Moore to give it to him. This the young
lieutenant did, though my mother begged him to destroy it, lest Mr
Sampson should hear of the matter and take offence. But my brother
promised her not to let it go out of his keeping, and there the thing
ended--so we thought.

Yet, in some way, my mother's convict and free servants came to hear of
the picture--they had already bandied about the parson's nickname--and
every one of them, on some cunning excuse, had come to my brother's room
and laughed at the drawing; and very often when they saw the clergyman
riding past the house, attended by his convict orderly, they would say,
with an added curse, 'There goes "Diabolical Howl,'" for they all hated
the man, because, being a magistrate as well as a minister, he had
sentenced many a prisoner to a dreadful flogging and had watched it
being administered.

But perhaps it was not altogether on account of the floggings in which
he so believed for which he was so detested--for floggings were common
enough for even small breaches of the regulations of the System--but
for the spiritual admonition with which he dosed them afterwards, while
their backs were still black and bloody from the cat. Once, when an old
convict named Callaghan was detected stealing some sugar belonging to
one of the pilot boat's crew, my mother went to Dr Parsons, who, with
the Reverend Mr Sampson, was to hear