that justice is even-handed! To think that such an one should presume to advise him to become practical, with a view to wealth and happiness! It was like the adulterous woman who, on eloping with her paramour, wrote to her husband enjoining him to be virtuous if he would be happy. The incongruity struck the prisoner so forcibly that for a moment he was on the verge of another explosion of sardonic laughter. Before leaving the dock he made one last attempt to draw attention to the treatment he had sustained while in prison. By way of heightening the effect of his narration, he informed the Court that his letters had been suppressed by the sheriff:[18] that while his enemies had been allowed to fill the newspapers with lying diatribes against him, and to prejudice the public mind in view of his impending trial, his own letters to the Niagara _Spectator_ had been rigidly withheld from the light of day, and this by official interference. Chief Justice Powell put the cap-sheaf upon the pinnacle of absurdity by informing him that if he chose he might prosecute the sheriff. Prosecute the sheriff! when he had just been sentenced by the Chief Justice himself to leave the Province within twenty-four hours, and when he was liable to the last penalty of the law in case of his return to prosecute! The trial was ended, and--blissful thought!--for the ensuing twenty-four hours he was free to come and go whithersoever he would. He was taken in charge by his friends the Hamiltons, and spent the night in their house at Queenston. Next day--Saturday, the 21st of August--he obeyed the mandate of the law, and shook from his feet the parched dust of Upper Canadian soil. His mental condition was far from satisfactory, but he would brook no interference with his actions, even from his best friends. The feeling uppermost in his bosom was a delicious sense of being at large, with no one to shut the cell door upon him, or otherwise to control his actions. He felt like one recalled to life. The unhappy man was well aware that his brain was weak, but he also knew that he was not what is ordinarily understood as insane. Like Baldassarre, he carried within him that piteous stamp of sanity, the clear consciousness of shattered faculties. His feebleness was as patent to himself as to others. He knew that he was the mere wreck of what he had once been, and he knew further that his mental and bodily ruin was due to the triumph of tyranny and injustice. Still, he was, for the moment, happy. There was sunshine in his heart, and gladness in his eye. Having crossed the Niagara river, he knew that he was beyond the material grasp of those whose baneful shadow was nevertheless destined to darken the rest of his life. "I thanked God," he writes, several years afterwards, "as I set my first foot on the American shore, that I trod on a land of freedom. The flow of animal spirits carried me along for more than two miles in triumphant disgust.