Shuffleton Gibbs had been examined before the magistrates, and committed for trial on the clearest evidence, as we have intimated; so that the prediction of the showman, that he would not leave his bed again, was not fully verified: only a very few weeks elapsed, however, before the criminal gradually sank, and at last died as much from want of gin as through disease. He died a miserable death, uninfluenced altogether by the ministrations of the chaplain who, by a strange coincidence, had been a member of that very college where Gibbs and Richard Tallant had first become acquainted; but before he died, when he felt quite satisfied that he was in no danger of being hung, he admitted the truth of the showman’s evidence, and not only confessed his own guilt, but boasted of it, gloated over it, and described the murder in fearfully graphic terms, until the prison officials sickened at the details, and shrunk back from the awful skeleton-like figure that grinned and raved in those last death agonies. Confronted with the chief witness against him, Gibbs put out his skinny hand, which the showman took timidly in his, and with that professional feeling which never deserted the owner of the famous dog Momus, Digby Martin, _alias_ Smith, thought to himself what a rival Gibbs would have been just then to that living skeleton, who had treated him so shamefully at Severntown! It is neither necessary nor desirable that we should dwell upon this wretched scene in the prison, where the last of the race to which Gibbs belonged ended his miserable career. Let it suffice that he died and was buried; and that the showman was released, and afterwards brought quite a small fortune to the proprietor of the tavern near the Brazencrook Music Hall, by relating the true particulars of the murder in the ruined castle of Montem, exhibiting the clothes of the murderer, and the pistol with which the deed was done. Momus took her share in these performances, and afterwards went round with the hat,--being faithful to her rough master to the last, and never wearying in her obedience to his behests. Thomas Dibble was found guilty; but in consideration of the excellent character which he received from several witnesses, and the whole of the circumstances under which the robbery was committed, he was only sentenced to three months’ imprisonment. During the whole of this time, Mrs. Dibble remained at Montem Castle with the housekeeper, except when she went, once a month, to see Thomas, for a few minutes, at the gaol, upon which occasions she made a show of forgiveness and sympathy; but she could never resist telling the turnkey, in Dibble’s presence, of her boarding-school education, the proposals of marriage which she had received when she lived at home with her pa, and other biographical reminiscences with which the reader is already too familiar.