_Chief-Justice Twofold_


The Judge found himself in a corridor lighted with dingy oil lamps, the
walls of bare stone; it looked like a passage in a prison. His guards
placed him in the hands of other people. Here and there he saw bony and
gigantic soldiers passing to and fro, with muskets over their shoulders.
They looked straight before them, grinding their teeth, in bleak fury,
with no noise but the clank of their shoes. He saw these by glimpses,
round corners, and at the ends of passages, but he did not actually pass
them by.

And now, passing under a narrow doorway, he found himself in the dock,
confronting a judge in his scarlet robes, in a large court-house. There
was nothing to elevate this Temple of Themis above its vulgar kind
elsewhere. Dingy enough it looked, in spite of candles lighted in decent
abundance. A case had just closed, and the last juror's back was seen
escaping through the door in the wall of the jury-box. There were some
dozen barristers, some fiddling with pen and ink, others buried in
briefs, some beckoning, with the plumes of their pens, to their
attorneys, of whom there were no lack; there were clerks to-ing and
fro-ing, and the officers of the court, and the registrar, who was handing
up a paper to the judge; and the tipstaff, who was presenting a note at
the end of his wand to a king's counsel over the heads of the crowd
between. If this was the High Court of Appeal, which never rose day or
night, it might account for the pale and jaded aspect of everybody in
it. An air of indescribable gloom hung upon the pallid features of all
the people here; no one ever smiled; all looked more or less secretly