his Roman nose, had a long grey beard, quoted Scripture to chance passengers, and was very earnest for their salvation.  He was atoning for the sins of his youth by leading the life of a hermit by praying and cheating.  He has had many followers.  He made mistakes in his cash, which for a while were overlooked in so good a man, but they became at length so serious that he lost his billet.  He had for some time been spoken of by his friends and admirers as “Mr. Nicholas,” but after his last mistakes had been discovered, he began to be known merely as “Old Nick the Lawyer,” or “Old Nick the Liar,” which some ignorant people look upon as convertible terms.  I think Lizard Skin, the cannibal, was a better Christian than old Nick the lawyer, as he was brave and honest, and scorned to tell a lie.

The convict counsel for the four seamen defended them at a great expenditure of learning and lies.  He argued at great length:—­ “That there was no evidence that a master mariner named Blogg ever existed; that he was an outlaw, and, as such, every British subject had an inchoate right to kill him at sight, and, therefore, that the seamen, supposing for the sake of argument that they did kill him, acted strictly within their legal rights; that Blogg drowned himself in a fit of delirium tremens, after being drunk on rum three days and nights consecutively; that he fell overboard accidentally and was drowned; that the cook and mate threw him overboard, and then laid the blame on the innocent seamen; that Blogg swam ashore, and was now living on an unchartered island; that if he was murdered, his body had not been found:  there could be no murder without a corpse; and finally, he would respectfully submit to that honourable court, that the case bristled with ineradicable difficulties.”

The seamen would have been sent to the gallows in any case, but Nicholas’ speech made their fate inevitable.  The court brushed aside the legal bristles, and hanged the four seamen on the evidence of the mate and the cook.

The tragedy of the gallows was followed by a short afterpiece.  Jim Parrish, Ned Tomlins, and every whaler and foremast man in Hobart Town and on the Tamar, discussed the evidence both drunk and sober, and the opinion was universal that the cook ought to have sworn an oath strong enough to go through a three-inch slab of hardwood that he had seen Captain Blogg carried up to heaven by angels, instead of swearing away the lives of men who had taken his part when he was triced up to the mast.  The cook was in this manner tried by his peers and condemned to die, and he knew it.  He tried to escape by shipping on board a schooner bound to Portland Bay with whalers.  The captain took on board a keg of rum, holding fifteen gallons, usually called a “Big Pup,” and invited the mate to share the liquor with him.  The result was that the two officers soon became incapable of rational navigation.  Off King’s Island the schooner was hove to in a gale of wind, and for