Never was St. Stephen so pelted. No wonder in the world, that under such a huge heap of rubbish, he became utterly dumbfounded, bamboozled, obfuscated, mizmazed, spifflicated, flummockst, and flabbergasted; seeing which the Chief Pitcher, as usual, enquired whether he had the infinitesimal of a word to say against being strangled into a blackamoor, with the very eyes of his head giving notice to quit. What matter that Tony had a bramble in his mind, that bore reasons like blackberries, and ripe ones too; as for example, that a tight rope round the gullet is very bad for the health, and particularly when one’s health requires to take pills, or even boluses, three times a day? I say, he might have given a thousand such reasonable reasons against hanging, but the very momentous minute of opening his mouth, the Chief Pitcher pitched into it a prodigious great bung, as dab and apt and cleverly as if he had played at nothing else but chuck-farthing and pitch-in-the-hole ever since he was fourteen. So the mummy of silence being preserved, the Merlinising began, and hey presto! before you could say Herman Boaz, the big wig was turned into a black cap! After that you may tell the world that our Judges are no conjurors. Thus the trial ended, and Tony’s sentence, as taken in the hieroglyphical short-hand, ran thus: namely, “that he was to be sent on a Black Monday to the Deaf and Dumb School that is kept in a coffin.” All this time, mark you, he had the whim with him in the dock, and to look at it now and then seemed his only comfort in life,--how it whisked and frisked, and looked about it, and fed heartily, as if there had been no such thing as law or law-cats in the blessed world; and when Tony went back, like a volume of felony, to be bound in stone, the whim still went with him to his cell, and from his cell to the press-room, and from the press-room to the debtor’s door, and from the debtor’s door to death’s door itself, which opens on the scaffold, as you turn off to the right hand or the left, in your way to nobody knows where. To take such a whim of a reptile with one to the gallows, seems whimsical enough; but the Emperor Adrian, if you read the classics, had such a vagabondish, blandish, little animal, his animula vagula blandula, to be with him on his death-bed.