of the broad street leading from the Old Bailey to Tyburn, the cart's
tail, and the hangman's lash.

Notwithstanding this demonstration, the Judge was pleased. It was a
disguised "affidavit man," or footpad, no doubt, who had been employed
to frighten him. The trick had fallen through.

A "court of appeal," such as the false Hugh Peters had indicated, with
assassination for its sanction, would be an uncomfortable institution
for a "hanging judge" like the Honourable Justice Harbottle. That
sarcastic and ferocious administrator of the criminal code of England,
at that time a rather pharisaical, bloody and heinous system of justice,
had reasons of his own for choosing to try that very Lewis Pyneweck, on
whose behalf this audacious trick was devised. Try him he would. No man
living should take that morsel out of his mouth.

Of Lewis Pyneweck, of course, so far as the outer world could see, he
knew nothing. He would try him after his fashion, without fear, favour,
or affection.

But did he not remember a certain thin man, dressed in mourning, in
whose house, in Shrewsbury, the Judge's lodgings used to be, until a
scandal of ill-treating his wife came suddenly to light? A grocer with a
demure look, a soft step, and a lean face as dark as mahogany, with a
nose sharp and long, standing ever so little awry, and a pair of dark
steady brown eyes under thinly-traced black brows--a man whose thin lips
wore always a faint unpleasant smile.

Had not that scoundrel an account to settle with the Judge? had he not
been troublesome lately? and was not his name Lewis Pyneweck, some time