'Stop!' said the Sergeant, drawing a paper from his pocket. '"Captain Eykin,"' he began to read, '"has been a sailor. Rolls in his walk; height, about five foot five; very broad in the shoulders; long in the arms; of great strength."' 'That is so,' said Barnaby, complacently. '"Legs short and figure stumpy."' 'What?' cried Barnaby, 'stumpy?' '"Legs short and figure stumpy,"' repeated the Sergeant reading. 'That is so set down is it? Then,' said Barnaby, looking down at his limbs, ''twas a pity that, with such legs as these, I did not deny my name. Call these short, brother?' CHAPTER XXV. ILMINSTER CLINK. How can I tell--oh! how can I sit down to tell in cold blood the story of all that followed? Some parts of it for very pity I must pass over. All that has been told or written of the Bloody Assize is most true, and yet not half that happened can be told. There are things, I mean, which the historian cannot, for the sake of pity, decency, and consideration for living people, relate, even if he hath seen them. You who read the printed page may learn how in one place so many were hanged; in another place so many; how some were hung in gemmaces, so that at every cross-road there was a frightful gibbet with a dead man on it; how some died of small-pox in the crowded prisons, and some of fever; and how Judge Jeffreys rode from town to town, followed by gangs of miserable prisoners driven after him to stand their trial in towns where they would be known; how the wretched sufferers were drawn and quartered, and their limbs seethed in pitch, and stuck up over the whole country; how the women and boys of tender years were flogged through market-towns--you, I say, who read these things on the cold page presently (even if you be a stickler for the Right Divine and hold rebellion as a mortal sin) feel your blood to boil with righteous wrath. The hand of the Lord was afterwards heavy upon those who ordered these things; nay, at the very time (this is a most remarkable Judgment, and one little known) when this inhuman Judge was thundering at his victims--so that some went mad and even dropped down dead with fear--he was himself, as Humphrey hath assured me, suffering the most horrible pain from a dire disease; so that the terrors of his voice and of his fiery eyes were partly due to the agony of his disease, and he was enduring all through that Assize, in his own body, pangs greater than any that he ordered! As for his miserable end, and the fate that overtook his master, that we know; and candid souls cannot but confess that here were truly Judgments of God, visible for all to see and acknowledge. But no pen can truly depict what the eye saw and the ear heard during that terrible time. And, think you, if it was a terrible and a wretched time for those who had no relations among the rebels, and only looked on and saw these bloody executions and heard the lamentations of the poor women who lost their lovers