When, at the last, I was told to plead, and at the bidding of an Officer of the Court, who stood underneath me, had pleaded Not Guilty, and had been asked how I would be tried, and had answered, likewise at his bidding, "By God and my Country," and when after that the Clerk of the Arraigns had prayed Heaven--and I am sure I needed it, and thanked him heartily at the time, kind Gentleman, thinking that he meant it, and not knowing that it was a mere Legal Form--to send me a good Deliverance,--the Judge bids me, to my great surprise, to Stand By. I thought at first that they were going to have Mercy on me, and would have down on my knees in gratitude to them. But it was not so; and the sleepy old Judge, suddenly waking up, told me that there were two Indictments against me, and that I should have the honour of being tried separately. Goodness save us! I was looked upon as one of the most desperate of the Gang, and was to be tried, not only under the Black Act, but that, not having the fear of God before my eyes, but being moved by the instigation of the Devil, I had, against the peace of our Sovereign Lord the King, attempted feloniously to kill, slay, and murder one John Foss, a Corporal in his Majesty's Regiment of Grenadier Footguards, by striking him, the said John Foss, over the back, breast, hips, loins, shoulders, thighs, legs, feet, arms, and fingers, with a certain deadly and lethal weapon, to wit, with a demijohn of Brandy. I was put back and kept all day in the prison. At evening came in my comrades, and from them I learnt that the case had gone dead against them from the beginning, that the Jury had found them guilty under the Statute without leaving the box; and that, as the felony was one without the benefit of Clergy, Judge Blackcap had put on a wig as black as his name, and sentenced every man Jack of them to be hanged on the Monday week next following. So then it came to my turn to be tried. The ordeal on the first Indictment was very short; for, at the Judge's bidding, the Jury acquitted me of trying to murder Corporal Foss before I had been ten minutes in the dock. I did not understand the proceedings in the least at that time; but I was told afterwards that the clever legal gentleman who had drawn up the Indictment against me, while very particularly setting down the parts of the body on which I might have struck Corporal Foss, omitted to specify the one place, namely, his head, on which I did hit him. Counsel for the Crown endeavoured, indeed, to prove that a splinter from the broken demijohn had grazed the corporal's finger, but the evidence for this fell dead. And, again, it coming out that I was arraigned as John Danger, whereas I had given the name of John Dangerous, to which I had perhaps no more right than to that of the Pope of Rome, the Judge roundly tells the Jury that the Indictment is bad in law, and I was forthwith acquitted as aforesaid.