amongst the prisoners, listening to their
wants, and doing what he could with rough sailor talk and dropping coins
to lighten their troubles. There is a language in the kindly eye and
the honest brow which all men may understand; and though the seaman's
speeches might have been in Greek, for all that they conveyed to the
Somersetshire peasants, yet they crowded round him as he departed and
called blessings upon his head. I felt as though he had brought a whiff
of his own pure ocean breezes into our close and noisome prison, and
left us the sweeter and the healthier.

Late in August the judges started from London upon that wicked journey
which blighted the lives and the homes of so many, and hath left a
memory in the counties through which they passed which shall never fade
while a father can speak to a son. We heard reports of them from day to
day, for the guards took pleasure in detailing them with many coarse and
foul jests, that we might know what was in store for us, and lose none
of what they called the pleasures of anticipation. At Winchester the
sainted and honoured Lady Alice Lisle was sentenced by Chief Justice
Jeffreys to be burned alive, and the exertions and prayers of her
friends could scarce prevail upon him to allow her the small boon of
the axe instead of the faggot. Her graceful head was hewn from her
body amidst the groans and the cries of a weeping multitude in the
market-place of the town. At Dorchester the slaughter was wholesale.
Three hundred were condemned to death, and seventy-four were actually
executed, until the most loyal and Tory of the country squires had to
complain of the universal presence of the dangling bodies. Thence the
judges proceeded to Exeter and thence to Taunton, which they reached in
the first week of September, more like furious and ravenous beasts which
have tasted blood and cannot quench their cravings for slaughter, than
just-minded men, trained to distinguish the various degrees of guilt, or
to pick out the innocent and screen him from injustice. A rare field
was open for their cruelty, for in Taunton alone there lay a thousand
hapless prisoners, many of whom were so little trained to express their
thoughts, and so hampered by the strange dialect in which they spoke,
that they might have been born dumb for all the chance they had of
making either judge or counsel understand the pleadings which they
wished to lay before them.

It was on a Monday evening that the Lord Ch