There was, however, no runaway horse to-day; but suddenly a great silence came over the people, and a sullen gloom that made a great despondency in my mind without my knowing why.  Public solemnity affects even the youngest of us.  At all events, it affected me.

Presently—­and deeply is the event impressed on my mind after seventy years of a busy life, full of almost every conceivable event—­I saw, emerging from a bystreet that led from Bedford Jail, and coming along through the square and near the window where I was standing, a common farm cart, drawn by a horse which was led by a labouring man.  As I was above the crowd on the first floor I could see there was a layer of straw in the cart at the bottom, and above it, tumbled into a rough heap, as though carelessly thrown in, a quantity of the same; and I could see also from all the surrounding circumstances, especially the pallid faces of the crowd, that there was something sad about it all.  The horse moved slowly along, at almost a snail’s pace, while behind walked a poor, sad couple with their heads bowed down, and each with a hand on the tail-board of the cart.  They were evidently overwhelmed with grief.

Happily we have no such processions now; even Justice itself has been humanized to some extent, and the law’s cruel severity mitigated.  The cart contained the rude shell into which had been laid the body of this poor man and woman’s only son, a youth of seventeen, hanged that morning at Bedford Jail for setting fire to a stack of corn!

He was now being conveyed to the village of Willshampstead, six miles from Bedford, there to be laid in the little churchyard where in his childhood he had played.  He was the son of very respectable labouring people of Willshampstead; had been misled into committing what was more a boyish freak than a crime, and was hanged.  That was all the authorities could do for him, and they did it.  This is the remotest and the saddest reminiscence of my life, and the only sad one I mean to relate, if I can avoid it.

But years afterwards, when I became a judge, this picture, photographed on my mind as it was, gave me many a lesson which I believe was turned to good account on the judicial bench.  It was mainly useful in impressing on my mind the great consideration of the surrounding circumstances of every crime, the degree of guilt in the criminal, and the difference in the degrees of the same kind of offence.  About this I shall say something hereafter.

I remained at this school until I had acquired all the learning my father thought necessary for my future position, as he intended it to be, and much more than I thought necessary, unless I was to get my living by teaching Latin and Greek.

In due course I was articled to my worthy uncle, the Clerk of the Peace, and, had I possessed my present experience, should have known that it was a diplomatic move of the most profound policy to enable me, if anything happened to him, to succeed to that important dignity.