The sexton’s house giving upon the green, Hawthorn could find pretext enough for gathering there in humming clusters. The sexton had a clean, bare room where at times charges were heard and prisoners brought up for examination from a cellar-like apartment below. On the whole, Justice Carthew preferred it to having poachers and vagrants, quarrelers, swearers and breakers of various commandments, petty officers, complainants, and witnesses trampling into Carthew House. Now as the warm midday drew on, he entered, marshalled by the constable; with him, besides a young man half his son’s tutor, half his own clerk, Master Clement, and a neighbour or two of fair consequence in the village and in Hawthorn Church. In the room already were the North-End Farm folk. The crowd pressed in behind, or, when no more were admitted, stood as close as might be without the door, left open for the air. Outside the one crazy window boys stood on heaped stones, their eyes a-row above the sill. The air seemed to beat and sound and pulse. No other kind of lawbreaking could so raise, so universalize, emotion. Other kinds were particular, affecting a few. But where sorcery and witchcraft, blasphemy and heresy, were arraigned, even though it were in a poor room and village like to this, there the universal enemy, there the personal foe of God Almighty, came into court! The personal foe of God was naturally the would-be murderer of every baptized soul alive—the unbaptized were his already. Nor did he stop at attempts against their souls; he did not hesitate to direct his engines against their bodies and their goods, to burn their ricks and barns, blast their fields, palsy their arms, lame their beasts, make their children peak and pine, wither the strength of men within them—If he had not yet harmed them to-day, he but waited for the chance to do so to-morrow! No man, woman, or child was safe, and the thing to be done was to destroy his instruments as fast as they were found. The North-End Farm boy—an observer from the platform of a further age might have conjectured that it was partly a nervous disorder marked by hysteria, partly an impish satisfaction in the commotion produced and the attention received, partly an actual rejoicing in the workings of his own imagination together with a far past, early-man unawareness of any reason for forbearance—the North-End Farm boy cried out and writhed tormentedly. They brought Mother Spuraway up the steep stair from the cellar and into the room, and making a clear space stood her before the boy for what should be judgement and doom. “The dog! the dog!” he cried, and writhed in the arms of the men behind him—“The dog!”