They looked on the prisoner with fierce red eyes, and rested on their hammers for a minute; and said the elder to his companion, “Take out Elijah Harbottle’s gyves;” and with a pincers he plucked the end which lay dazzling in the fire from the furnace.

“One end locks,” said he, taking the cool end of the iron in one hand, while with the grip of a vice he seized the leg of the Judge, and locked the ring round his ankle.  “The other,” he said with a grin, “is welded.”

The iron band that was to form the ring for the other leg lay still red hot upon the stone floor, with briliant sparks sporting up and down its surface.

His companion, in his gigantic hands, seized the old Judge’s other leg, and pressed his foot immovably to the stone floor; while his senior, in a twinkling, with a masterly application of pincers and hammer, sped the glowing bar around his ankle so tight that the skin and sinews smoked and bubbled again, and old Judge Harbottle uttered a yell that seemed to chill the very stones, and make the iron chains quiver on the wall.

Chains, vaults, smiths, and smithy all vanished in a moment; but the pain continued.  Mr. Justice Harbottle was suffering torture all round the ankle on which the infernal smiths had just been operating.

His friends, Thavies and Beller, were startled by the Judge’s roar in the midst of their elegant trifling about a marriage a-la-mode case which was going on.  The Judge was in panic as well as pain.  The street lamps and the light of his own hall door restored him.

“I’m very bad,” growled he between his set teeth; “my foot’s blazing.  Who was he that hurt my foot?  ’Tis the gout—­’tis the gout!” he said, awaking completely.  “How many hours have we been coming from the playhouse?  ’Sblood, what has happened on the way?  I’ve slept half the night!”

There had been no hitch or delay, and they had driven home at a good pace.

The Judge, however, was in gout; he was feverish too; and the attack, though very short, was sharp; and when, in about a fortnight, it subsided, his ferocious joviality did not return.  He could not get this dream, as he chose to call it, out of his head.

CHAPTER VIII

Somebody Has Got Into the House

People remarked that the Judge was in the vapours.  His doctor said he should go for a fortnight to Buxton.

Whenever the Judge fell into a brown study, he was always conning over the terms of the sentence pronounced upon him in his vision—­“in one calendar month from the date of this day;” and then the usual form, “and you shall be hanged by the neck till you are dead,” etc.  “That will be the 10th—­I’m not much in the way of being hanged.  I know what stuff dreams are, and I laugh at them; but this is continually in my thoughts, as if it forecast misfortune of some sort.  I wish the day my dream gave me were passed