A long-sighted man could have discerned that he was a dark fellow, lean;
and from continually looking down on the earth from the elevation over
which, in another sense, he always hung, his nose, his lips, his chin
were pendulous and loose, and drawn down into a monstrous grotesque.

This fellow took his pipe from his mouth on seeing the coach, stood up,
and cut some solemn capers high on his beam, and shook a new rope in the
air, crying with a voice high and distant as the caw of a raven hovering
over a gibbet, "A robe for Judge Harbottle!"

The coach was now driving on at its old swift pace.

So high a gallows as that, the Judge had never, even in his most
hilarious moments, dreamed of. He thought, he must be raving. And the
dead footman! He shook his ears and strained his eyelids; but if he was
dreaming, he was unable to awake himself.

There was no good in threatening these scoundrels. A _brutum fulmen_
might bring a real one on his head.

Any submission to get out of their hands; and then heaven and earth he
would move to unearth and hunt them down.

Suddenly they drove round a corner of a vast white building, and under a
_porte-cochère_.




CHAPTER VII