"Mutiny" and "Prisonrupt," and sends post-haste for Justice Palmworm, her gossip indeed, and one of those trading magistrates that so disgraced our bench before Mr. Henry Fielding the writer stirred up Authority to put some order therein. The Justice comes; and he and the Gaoleress, after cracking a bottle of mulled port between them, poor Mother Drum was brought up before his Worship for mutinous conduct. The Justice would willingly have compounded the case, for Lucre was his only love; but 'twas vengeance the Gaoleress hankered after; and the end of it was that poor Mother Drum was triced up at the post that was by the Stocks, and had a dozen and a half from a cat with indeed but three tails, but that, I warrant, hurt pretty nigh as sharply as nine would have done in weaker hands; for 'twas the Gaoleress that played the Beadle and laid on the Scourge. At length, when I was quite tired out, and, knowing nothing of the course of Law, began to think that we were doomed to perpetual Imprisonment, His Majesty's Judges of Assize came upon their circuit, and those whom the Fever and Want and the Duresse of their Keeper had spared were put upon their trial. By this time I was thought well enough, though as gaunt as a Hound, to be put in the same Gaol-bird's trim as my companions; so a pair of Woman's fetters--ay, my friends, the women wore fetters in those days--were put upon me; and the whole of us, all shackled as we were, found ourselves, one fine Monday morning, in the Dock, having been driven thereinto very much after the fashion of a flock of sheep. The Court was crowded, for the case against the Blacks had made a prodigious stir; and the King's Attorney, the most furious Person for talking a Fellow-creature's Life away that ever I remember to have seen or heard, came down especially from London to prosecute us. Neither he nor His Lordship the Judge, in his charge to the Grand Jury, had any but the worst of words to give us; and folks began to say that this would be another Bloody Assize; that the Shire Hall had need to be hung with scarlet, as when Jeffreys was on the bench; and that as short work would be made of us as of the Rebels in the West. And I did not much care, for I was sick of lying in hold, amidst Evil Odours, and with a green wound. It came even to whispering that one of us at least would be made a Gibbeting-in-chains example for killing the Grenadier, if that Act could be fixed on any particular Black. And half in jest, half in earnest, the Woman-Keeper told me on the morning of the Assizes that, young as I was (not yet twelve years of age), my bones might rattle in a birdcage in the midst of Charlwood Chase; for if I could brain one Grenadier, I could kill another. But yet, being so weary of the Life, I did not much Care.