The youth answered languidly.  He began to tire, and nature craved repose, and the physician had urged it.  Forrester readily perceived that the listener’s interest was flagging—­nay he half fancied that much that he had been saying, and in his best style, had fallen upon drowsy senses.  Nobody likes to have his best things thrown away, and, as the reader will readily conceive, our friend Forrester had a sneaking consciousness that all the world’s eloquence did not cease on the day when Demosthenes died.  But he was not the person to be offended because the patient desired to sleep.  Far from it.  He was only reasonable enough to suppose that this was the properest thing that the wounded man could do.  And so he told him; and adjusting carefully the pillows of the youth, and disposing the bedclothes comfortably, and promising to see him again before he slept, our woodman bade him good night, and descended to the great hall of the tavern, where Jared Bunce was held in durance.

The luckless pedler was, in truth, in a situation in which, for the first time in his life, he coveted nothing.  The peril was one, also, from which, thus far, his mother-wit, which seldom failed before, could suggest no means of evasion or escape.  His prospect was a dreary one; though with the wonderful capacity for endurance, and the surprising cheerfulness, common to the class to which he belonged, he beheld it without dismay though with many apprehensions.

Justice he did not expect, nor, indeed, as Forrester has already told us, did he desire it.  He asked for nothing less than justice.  He was dragged before judges, all of whom had complaints to prefer, and injuries to redress; and none of whom were over-scrupulous as to the nature or measure of that punishment which was to procure them the desired atonement.  The company was not so numerous as noisy.  It consisted of some twenty persons, villagers as well as small farmers in the neighborhood, all of whom, having partaken ad libitum of the whiskey distributed freely about the table, which, in part, they surrounded, had, in the Indian phrase, more tongues than brains, and were sufficiently aroused by their potations to enter readily into any mischief.  Some were smoking with all the industrious perseverance of the Hollander; others shouted forth songs in honor of the bottle, and with all the fervor and ferment of Bacchanalian novitiates; and not a few, congregating about the immediate person of the pedler, assailed his ears with threats sufficiently pregnant with tangible illustration to make him understand and acknowledge, by repeated starts and wincings, the awkward and uncomfortable predicament in which he stood.  At length, the various disputants for justice, finding it difficult, if not impossible, severally, to command that attention which they conceived they merited, resolved themselves into something like a committee of the whole, and proceeded to the settlement of their controversy, and the pedler’s fate, in a manner more suited to the importance of the occasion.  Having procured that attention which was admitted to be the great object, more by the strength of his lungs than his argument, one of the company, who was dignified by the title of colonel, spoke out for the rest.