And so he reached the Town Hall, which was thronged with curious spectators. The attempt on Wilton’s life had been noised all over the county, and the gentry and farmers for miles round came to hear the examination. They came to see, too, Mr. Wilton. His history was well known, as well as his understood successful claim to the Eglinton estates. Great curiosity was evinced to see the rich landed proprietor who had lived for years little better than a beggar in London. Three was a somewhat anxious desire on the part of the fair sex, too, to have a peep at the young gentleman who had saved Mr. Wilton’s life. Report had declared him to be the very handsomest of fine young fellows; that Miss Wilton had fallen passionately in love with him, and was to be married to him in a month; that she had selected her _trousseau_, and was looking up her bridesmaids. There was a very general morbid curiosity also to gaze on Mr. Chewkle. Mr. Chewkle, whose race was run--Mr. Chewkle, who had possessed such faith in having the luck which was “all.” He possessed it no more: it had deserted him now. He knew it, and looked into the future with a vacant stare and blank despair. When first made prisoner and incarcerated, he forwarded a letter to Mr. Grahame, in which he briefly stated that events had proved untoward, and called upon him to hasten to release him by some means from his dilemma. No answer was returned to his epistle. He wrote again, intimating that, unless his employer made his appearance, revelations would be made. Still no answer. Chewkle was devoured with sickening anxiety, and dropped a line to his passionately attached friend Jukes, asking him to call upon Mr. Grahame, and wake him up. He gave him a few hints to use which would be likely to terrify the proud man, as coming from a stranger, and he signed himself “Old Chewk.” But Jukes was a rat who skulked from a sinking ship, so he burned the letter, and swore to himself that he had never received it. Chewkle grew desperate at being thus deserted, and he gave Mr. Grahame, as he said, “one more chance;” in another and last epistle, he spoke out very plainly. He alluded to incitement to murder, of the forgery they had together committed, and he ended by informing Mr. Grahame that if he did not proceed instanter to “do the thing that was right,” he should make a clean breast of all. “And if I am lagged for life,” he said, “you shall go with me, even if we should be in the same gang, and chained together up to our buzzums in water, until one of us turns up his toes.” This more expressive than elegant epistle met with no better fate than the others.