“What cheer, Barnaby?”, cried Hugh.  “Don’t be downcast, lad.  Leave that to him,” he added, with a nod in the direction of Dennis, held up between two men.

“Bless you!” cried Barnaby, “I’m not frightened, Hugh.  I’m quite happy.  Look at me!  Am I afraid to die?  Will they see me tremble?”

“I’d say this,” said Hugh, wringing Barnaby by the hand, and looking round at the officers and functionaries gathered in the yard, “that if I had ten lives to lose I’d lay them all down to save this one.  This one that will be lost through mine!”

“Not through you,” said Barnaby mildly.  “Don’t say that.  You were not to blame.  You have always been very good to me.  Hugh, we shall know what makes the stars shine now!”

Hugh spoke no more, but moved onward in his place with a careless air, listening as he went to the service for the dead.  As soon as he had passed the door, his miserable associate was carried out; and the crowd beheld the rest.  Barnaby would have mounted the steps at the same time, but he was restrained, as he was to undergo the sentence elsewhere.

It was only just when the cart was starting that the courier reached the jail with the reprieve.  All night Gabriel Varden and his friends had been at work; they had gone to the young Prince of Wales, and even to the ante-chamber of the king himself.  Successful, at last, in awakening an interest in his favour, they had an interview with the minister in his bed as late as eight o’clock that morning.  The result of a searching inquiry was that, between eleven and twelve o’clock, a free pardon to Barnaby Rudge was made out and signed, and Gabriel Varden had the grateful task of bringing him home in triumph with an enthusiastic mob.

“I needn’t say,” observed the locksmith, when his house in Clerkenwell was reached at last, and he and Barnaby were safe within, “that, except among ourselves, I didn’t want to make a triumph of it.  But directly we got into the street, we were known, and the hub-bub began.  Of the two, and after experience of both, I think I’d rather be taken out of my house by a crowd of enemies than escorted home by a mob of friends!”

At last the crowd dispersed.  And Barnaby stretched himself on the ground beside his mother’s couch, and fell into a deep sleep.

* * * * *

Bleak House

      “Bleak House,” a story with a purpose, like most of Dickens’s
     works, was published when the author was forty years old.  The
     object of the story was to ventilate the monstrous injustice
     wrought by delays in the old Court of Chancery, which defeated
     all the purposes of a court of justice.  Many of the
     characters, who, though famous, are not essential to the
     development of the story, were drawn from real life. 
     Turveydrop was suggested