bravery as though it were death, that it was as much of an occasion for spiritual consolation.  I could not believe—­when we were arrived at the New Field, and I was assisted from my chair in the midst of that hooting and jeering throng, which even the soldiers and the threatening gestures of the parson and my brother served but little to restrain—­that I was myself, and still more so, when I was at last seated in that shameful instrument, the stocks.

Ever since that time I have wondered whether mankind hath any bodily ills which are not dependent upon the mind for their existence, and are so curable by some sore stress of it.  For verily, though my wounds were not healed, and though I had not left my bed for a long time, and my seat was both rough and hard, and my feet were rudely pinioned between the boards, and the sun was blistering with that damp blister which frets the soul as well as the flesh, I seemed to sense nothing, except the shame and disgrace of my estate.  As for my bodily ailments, they might have been cured, for aught I knew of them.  To this time, when I lay me down to sleep after a harder day’s work than ordinary, I can see and hear the jeers of that rude crowd around the stocks.  Truly, after all, a man’s vanity is his point of vantage, and I wonder greatly if that be not the true meaning of the vulnerable spot in Achilles’s heel.  Some slight dignity, though I had not so understood it, I had maintained in the midst of my misfortunes.  To be a convict of one’s free will, to protect the maid of one’s love from grief, was one thing, but to sit in the stocks, exposed to the jibes of a common crowd, was another.  And more than aught else, I felt the sting of the comedy in it.  To sit there with my two feet straight out, soles to the people, through those rude holes in the boards, and all at liberty to gaze and laugh at me, was infinitely worse than to welter in my blood upon the scaffold.  How many times, as I sat there, it came to me that if it had been the scaffold, Mary Cavendish could at least have held my memory in some respect; as it was, she could but laugh.  Full easy it may be for any man with the courage of a man to figure in tragedy, but try him in comedy, if you would prove his mettle.

Shortly after I arrived there in the New Field, which was a wide, open space, the sports began, and I saw them all as in a dream, or worse than a dream, a nightmare.  First came Parson Downs, whispering to me that as long as he could do me no good, and was in sore need of money, and, moreover, since he would by so doing divert somewhat the public attention from me, he would enter the race which was shortly to come off for a prize of five pounds.

Then came a great challenge of drums, and the parson was in his saddle and the horses off on the three-mile course, my eyes following them into the dust-clouded distance, and seeing the parson come riding in ahead to the winning post, with that curious uncertainty as to the reality, which had been upon me all the morning.  That is, of the uncertainty of aught save my shameful abiding in the stocks.