The Judge clutched at the check-string.  The coach pulled up.  He stared about him.  They were not among houses; but through the windows, under a broad moonlight, he saw a black moor stretching lifelessly from right to left, with rotting trees, pointing fantastic branches in the air, standing here and there in groups, as if they held up their arms and twigs like fingers, in horrible glee at the Judge’s coming.

A footman came to the window.  He knew his long face and sunken eyes.  He knew it was Dingly Chuff, fifteen years ago a footman in his service, whom he had turned off at a moment’s notice, in a burst of jealousy, and indicted for a missing spoon.  The man had died in prison of the jail-fever.

The Judge drew back in utter amazement.  His armed companions signed mutely; and they were again gliding over this unknown moor.

The bloated and gouty old man, in his horror considered the question of resistance.  But his athletic days were long over.  This moor was a desert.  There was no help to be had.  He was in the hands of strange servants, even if his recognition turned out to be a delusion, and they were under the command of his captors.  There was nothing for it but submission, for the present.

Suddenly the coach was brought nearly to a standstill, so that the prisoner saw an ominous sight from the window.

It was a gigantic gallows beside the road; it stood three-sided, and from each of its three broad beams at top depended in chains some eight or ten bodies, from several of which the cere-clothes had dropped away, leaving the skeletons swinging lightly by their chains.  A tall ladder reached to the summit of the structure, and on the peat beneath lay bones.

On top of the dark transverse beam facing the road, from which, as from the other two completing the triangle of death, dangled a row of these unfortunates in chains, a hangman, with a pipe in his mouth, much as we see him in the famous print of the “Idle Apprentice,” though here his perch was ever so much higher, was reclining at his ease and listlessly shying bones, from a little heap at his elbow, at the skeletons that hung round, bringing down now a rib or two, now a hand, now half a leg.  A long-sighted man could have discerned that he was a dark fellow, lean; and from continually looking down on the earth from the elevation over which, in another sense, he always hung, his nose, his lips, his chin were pendulous and loose, and drawn down into a monstrous grotesque.

This fellow took his pipe from his mouth on seeing the coach, stood up, and cut some solemn capers high on his beam, and shook a new rope in the air, crying with a voice high and distant as the caw of a raven hovering over a gibbet, “A robe for Judge Harbottle!”

The coach was now driving on at its old swift pace.

So high a gallows as that, the Judge had never, even in his most hilarious moments, dreamed of.  He thought, he must be raving.  And the dead footman!  He shook his ears and strained his eyelids; but if he was dreaming, he was unable to awake himself.