He, indeed, made little resistance, for he began to see that he was at the mercy of these scoundrels. His wife clung to him, but they tore her roughly away. The children wailed in chorus, and "bludder Jack" crept downstairs in his thin nightgown to see what was causing the hubbub, howling like the rest without knowing why. But it was soon all over. Thomas barely got time to kiss his wife, and to whisper to her to tell Hawthorn, ere he was out of the cottage and away with his captors. All down the little village street the shrieks of his family rung in his ears, and his heart within him was like to burst with grief, humiliation, and impotent wrath. That night he was formally committed by Squire Greenaway himself to be tried for poaching, before the justices at Leamington Priors, on Tuesday next. This was Friday. In due course Thomas Wanless appeared before the "Justices"--God save them! and, after a very brief trial, was "let off," as one phrased it, with six months' hard labour in Warwick Jail. The only evidence against him was that of Tom Pemberton, but he made no attempt to deny the charge, and as the squires already considered him a "dangerous" fellow, they thought their sentence a model of clemency. So did Pemberton and Keeper Crabb. His judges were Wiseman, Greenaway, the man whose vermin he had helped to thin by just three rabbits, Parson Codling, of Ashbrook, and a bibulous old creature who lived in Leamington Priors, a retired Birmingham merchant, who had been made J.P. for his subservience to the Tories. Greenaway was violent, and rather disposed to give an "exemplary" sentence; Wiseman was contemptuously indifferent, as became a big acred man and the husband of a woman with a handle to her name; and Parson Codling was unctuously severe. An attempt was made to get Wanless to tell the name of his co-offender, but that he refused, so he was told that his obstinacy had prevented a more lenient sentence, which was false. But something is due to appearances at times, and even from such divine personages as justices of the peace. So careful was the "bench" of proprieties on this occasion, that Codling, on a hint from the chairman, gave Wanless the benefit of a short exhortation before consigning him to the salutary and eminently Christian discipline of the jailer. In the course of this homily, Codling took occasion to observe that he had once hoped better things of the prisoner, but had long ago been forced to give him up. "With grief and sorrow," said the parson, "I have again and again watched his obduracy, and his tendency to consort with agitators, or worse. His fate will, I trust, be a warning to others."