"How dare you, fellow, talk to me?" says he. "If I had the power I would commit you twice over for your insolent presumption, yes I would, so help me." "Yes, Tommie, you would, so help you," says his friend. "The spirit of Hector; ye speak like Priam's son. How dare the fellow ask to hear the evidence when you have had the magnanimity to commit him without it? Does he forget too that when innocence ceases to suffer it will no longer be the highest wisdom to be a rogue?" I was likely to profit nothing by these protestations of my innocence. This justice was evidently of the worst type of magistrate. He was too high and mighty to imperil his preconceived opinions by entering into the merits of the matter. He was too lofty to argue; too swollen with self-esteem to be affronted with facts. All persons who were brought before him must be guilty of some crime or other, otherwise they would not have come there; and he held that he had discharged his office with credit to himself and with profit to his country when he had impartially committed them to gaol. I soon came to the conclusion therefore that it would be impossible to prevail on a man of this mould with a simple relation of the case, or expect to meet with any suggestion of justice at his hands. I must try a more uncompromising method; and that an exceedingly bold one. I must prove to him beyond all doubt that I was far other than an ignorant gypsy, taking the risk of the revelation of my true identity, and any consequences that might ensue. For that matter if I must go to gaol, I might just as well go there in the role of the defaulting nobleman as in that of the larcenous vagabond. Disregarding all attempts on the part of the officers of the law to restrain me, I gazed about the spacious apartment with the air I might have worn had it still belonged to me, and says: "The old place is just as it was, I see. But, my good Sir Thomas, it grieves me to observe that you have put your fat aunt by the side of a Rubens; and that you have not scrupled to set a pompous citizen in a tie-wig, who, to judge by a certain consanguinity of expression and countenance, was the illustrous man your father and a cheesemonger at that, cheek by jowl with one of Vandyck's gentlemen." The justice was too incensed by this audacious speech to find words with which to reply to it. He spluttered and stuttered himself to the verge of an apoplexy. His friend took it far otherwise, however. "A hit, a palpable hit," says he, laughing heartily. "I never heard a ripe thought better expressed. And, damn it, Tommie, you deserve it too. Your fat aunt, and your illustrious father the cheesemonger in a tie-wig, ha, ha, ha! Our friend of the black eye and the bloody countenance is an amateur of the arts, a lover of the beautiful." "Remove the prisoners out of my presence," says the justice in a fury.