Mr. Probus, still with hanging head, appeared not to hear. The warder touched him on the shoulder and whispered. He held up his head for a moment: looked round the court, and murmured: 'No--no--it is all gone.' Nothing more could be got from him. 'John Merridew, you have now the opportunity of stating your own case.' He began in a trembling voice. He said that he had been long a sheriff's officer: that he had incurred great odium by his zeal in the arrest of criminals: that it was not true that he had concocted any plot either with Mr. Probus or with the other prisoners: that he was a man of consideration whose evidence had frequently been received with respect in that very court: that it was not true, further, as had been stated by the Prosecution, that he had ever encouraged thieves or advised them to become highwaymen: that, if he went to such places as the Black Jack, it was to arrest villains in the cause of Justice: that he deposed at the last trial, what he saw or thought he saw--namely a scuffle: he might have been in too great a hurry to conclude that the late prisoner Halliday was the assaulting party: the night was dark: he only knew the two witnesses as two rogues whom he intended to bring to justice on a dozen capital charges for each, as soon as he was out of Newgate: and that he was a person--this he earnestly begged the Court to consider--without whom the criminal Courts would be empty and Justice would be rendered impossible. With more to the same effect, and all with such servile cringings and entreaties for special consideration as did him, I am convinced, more harm than good. When it came to the Doctor's turn, he boldly declared that if the verdict of the Jury went against him--'And gentlemen,' he said, 'I must own that the evidence has certainly placed me in a strange, and unexpected and most painful position'--he would bring over the Archbishop of Dublin: the Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral: and the Provost of Trinity College: besides noblemen of the Irish Peerage and many of his old parishioners in order to prove that he was what he pretended to be. 'The assurance, gentlemen, that I shall be thus supported, enables me to bear up even against your possible view of the case and his Lordship's possible opinion. To a Divine of unblemished life it is, I confess, inexpressibly painful to be confused with forgers and highwaymen.'