But another Fielding presided there now. Dick received free lodging till morning, and then he was escorted to the court-room close at hand, to take his turn as one among a crowd of anxious wretches of both sexes, who stood in a railed enclosure at one side of a vacant space, before the table at which sat the grave magistrate in all the vestments and solemnity of his office. To Dick's amazement, he beheld in an opposite railed space certain faces with which he was acquainted,--those of his George Street landlady's son, the Monmouth Street shopman to whom he had sold the clothes, and the Vauxhall girl. Dick wondered what the whole business meant, and what it would lead to. At last his turn came. The magistrate glanced at him indifferently, and addressed him coldly, in a few words whose meaning Dick did not take pains to gather. Then a clerk at the table read monotonously a long document, wherein it appeared that a number of people had sworn to certain occurrences, which, as far as Dick could see, did not concern him in the least; namely, that Moreton Charteris, gentleman, of Bloomsbury Square, had been robbed of money, valuables, and wardrobe, early in the previous February, by a highwayman who had stopped his coach near Turnham Green; that a woman who had quarrelled at Reading with one Edward Lawson, known as Captain Ted, knew the said Lawson to have been the robber of Mr. Charteris, and, on her threatening to inform against him, to have fled towards Bath in one of the stolen suits of clothes; and that Mr. Charteris's servant had, in June, recognized one of the stolen suits in a Monmouth Street shop. And now the shopkeeper in the witness box identified that suit as the one so recognized, and Dick as the man who had sold it; and from further testimony Dick could infer that the servant's discovery had sent Bow Street runners to the shopman, who had referred them for information regarding Dick's whereabouts to the landlady's son, who in turn had sent them to the Vauxhall girl; and that through her treachery they had learned his place of lodging. In fact, that grateful creature had stood in wait with the constables at the head of Breakneck Stairs, and announced, when his first assailants' lantern had lit up his features, that he was the man the constables wanted. She had, though, kept out of his sight, from a greater sense of shame than many of her class would have shown. As for the attack by the Delahenty party, it had been as great a surprise to the waiting constables as to Dick.