and over.  I wish I were well purged of my gout.  I wish I were as I used to be.  ’Tis nothing but vapours, nothing but a maggot.”  The copy of the parchment and letter which had announced his trial with many a snort and sneer he would read over and over again, and the scenery and people of his dream would rise about him in places the most unlikely, and steal him in a moment from all that surrounded him into a world of shadows.

The Judge had lost his iron energy and banter.  He was growing taciturn and morose.  The Bar remarked the change, as well they might.  His friends thought him ill.  The doctor said he was troubled with hypochondria, and that his gout was still lurking in his system, and ordered him to that ancient haunt of crutches and chalk-stones, Buxton.

The Judge’s spirits were very low; he was frightened about himself; and he described to his housekeeper, having sent for her to his study to drink a dish of tea, his strange dream in his drive home from Drury Lane Playhouse.  He was sinking into the state of nervous dejection in which men lose their faith in orthodox advice, and in despair consult quacks, astrologers, and nursery storytellers.  Could such a dream mean that he was to have a fit, and so die on the both?  She did not think so.  On the contrary, it was certain some good luck must happen on that day.

The Judge kindled; and for the first time for many days, he looked for a minute or two like himself, and he tapped her on the cheek with the hand that was not in flannel.

“Odsbud! odsheart! you dear rogue!  I had forgot.  There is young Tom—­yellow Tom, my nephew, you know, lies sick at Harrogate; why shouldn’t he go that day as well as another, and if he does, I get an estate by it?  Why, lookee, I asked Doctor Hedstone yesterday if I was like to take a fit any time, and he laughed, and swore I was the last man in town to go off that way.”

The Judge sent most of his servants down to Buxton to make his lodgings and all things comfortable for him.  He was to follow in a day or two.

It was now the 9th; and the next day well over, he might laugh at his visions and auguries.

On the evening of the 9th, Dr. Hedstone’s footman knocked at the Judge’s door.  The Doctor ran up the dusky stairs to the drawing-room.  It was a March evening, near the hour of sunset, with an east wind whistling sharply through the chimney-stacks.  A wood fire blazed cheerily on the hearth.  And Judge Harbottle, in what was then called a brigadier-wig, with his red roquelaure on, helped the glowing effect of the darkened chamber, which looked red all over like a room on fire.

The Judge had his feet on a stool, and his huge grim purple face confronted the fire, and seemed to pant and swell, as the blaze alternately spread upward and collapsed.  He had fallen again among his blue devils, and was thinking of retiring from the Bench, and of fifty other gloomy things.