The times were perhaps somewhat out of joint; but the state of the colony was by no means such as to require that a prominent citizen, standing high in the affection of his countrymen, should be deprived of those inestimable privileges secured by the laws of England, to every one under accusation of high crimes and misdemeanors; and these laws had been adopted and were in full force in the infant state. At the very outset of the trial, Gen. Bacon objected to the military character of the court, as well as to the indecent haste and the retired nature of the place in which it was held. He contended that his crime, if crime he had committed, was a civil offence, and ought to be tried by the civil tribunals of the country. All these weighty objections were answered by a waive of the president's hand, and the trial proceeded to its previously well known conclusion, without farther interruption. Before the final vote was taken upon the question whether the prisoner was guilty of high treason or not, he was ordered to be removed from the court-room for a few moments, in order that their deliberations might be uninterrupted. As the guard marched the prisoner through the house into the back court of the establishment, his step still proud and his carriage elevated with the sense of conscious rectitude, he was at once brought to a stand by the sight of a spectacle which sent the blood, chilled with horror, back to his heart. This was a gibbet or gallows, erected in the very court to which they were conducting him, and upon it hung two of his own soldiers![13] All evidence of vitality had long since departed, and their bodies swung round and round, under the impulse of the morning breeze, in horrible monotony. Bacon's first sensation was one of unmixed horror, but this was succeeded by indignation; not a thought for his own safety occurred to his mind while under the first impressions of the fearful spectacle. But as fierce indignation stirred up his torpid energies to thoughts of revenge, the means began to present themselves, and then it was that he shook the iron fetters which bound him, in savage and morose despair. Perhaps a chill from some more personal feeling ran through his veins, when he reflected how short had been the passage of his two humble followers from the sloop which had borne them across the bay on the preceding night, to eternity. They had evidently suffered some hours previous--perhaps during the night. They were the two subaltern officers--selected by himself for his expedition down the river, and chosen for their desperate bravery at the battle of Bloody Run. And now to see their manly proportions ignominiously exposed upon a gibbet, after having been most inhumanly murdered, was more than he could calmly bear. Bitter and unavailing were his reflections as he stood a spectator of this outrage, while his own life hung suspended by a hair.