The Judge, however, was in gout; he was feverish too; and the attack,
though very short, was sharp; and when, in about a fortnight, it
subsided, his ferocious joviality did not return. He could not get this
dream, as he chose to call it, out of his head.




CHAPTER VIII


_Somebody Has Got Into the House_


People remarked that the Judge was in the vapours. His doctor said he
should go for a fortnight to Buxton.

Whenever the Judge fell into a brown study, he was always conning over
the terms of the sentence pronounced upon him in his vision--"in one
calendar month from the date of this day;" and then the usual form, "and
you shall be hanged by the neck till you are dead," etc. "That will be
the 10th--I'm not much in the way of being hanged. I know what stuff
dreams are, and I laugh at them; but this is continually in my thoughts,
as if it forecast misfortune of some sort. I wish the day my dream gave
me were passed and over. I wish I were well purged of my gout. I wish I
were as I used to be. 'Tis nothing but vapours, nothing but a maggot."
The copy of the parchment and letter which had announced his trial with
many a snort and sneer he would read over and over again, and the
scenery and people of his dream would rise about him in places the most
unlikely, and steal him in a moment from all that surrounded him into a