And now Dick, relieved of the oft-recurring Tyburn vision, was to learn what disposition was to be made of himself. Standing out from the prisoners' pen, and in the vacant space before the magistrate's table, he was addressed at some length by Sir John Fielding. It appeared that his story, as related to the governor of Newgate the previous day, having tallied with certain statements made by the other prisoner, had been considered by no less a personage than the Secretary of State. If he was one of the American prisoners who had been confined at Pendennis Castle, the justice said, his treatment ordinarily would have been the same as theirs,--that is to say, he would have been taken aboard the _Solebay_ frigate on the 8th of January, and sent back to America as a prisoner of war, subject to exchange (this was Dick's first intimation of what had befallen Allen and the others). But he had broken from custody while he still regarded it as likely that he would be proceeded against for high treason, and he was therefore to be considered as having admitted his guilt of high treason. However, it was the desire of the King to exhibit great clemency to his rebellious American subjects, even in the most aggravated cases; hence the justice dared presume that the Crown would not move against the prisoner on the charge of treason (Dick afterward guessed that the real reason for this self-denial on the Crown's part lay in the difficulty and expense of getting witnesses to the alleged treason). The prisoner had, however, been shown to have sold a stolen suit of clothes; he ought to have known, by the circumstances in which he had acquired the clothes, even if those circumstances were as he alleged, that the clothes had been stolen; his not so knowing was a fault, yet was the fault of no one other than him, hence must be his fault. The justice was, therefore, compelled, on information sworn by the Monmouth Street dealer and by Mr. Charteris's servant, to commit the prisoner for trial on this new charge. So back to Newgate went Dick, wondering whether matters were improved, after all. At the September sessions he was haled, upon indictment, before the bewigged judges and the stolid jury in the Old Bailey; pleaded not guilty, was tried with great expedition, convicted without delay, and sentenced (at the end of a solemn speech in which he thought at first the judge was driving at nothing less than death by hanging with the next Tyburn batch) to hard labor for three years on the river Thames. It appeared that the prisoner's general honesty, to which his George Street landlady's son voluntarily testified, influenced the judge against a capital sentence. Well, what is three years' hard labor to a man who has seriously contemplated a gibbet for several weeks past?