His reverence in the late battle showed himself a strategist, and won without bringing up his reserves; if he had failed with Mr. Lacy he had another arrow behind in his quiver.  He had been twice to the mayor and claimed a coroner’s jury to sit on a suicide.  The mayor had consented and the preliminary steps had been taken.

The morning after the jailer’s dismissal the inquest was held.  Mr. Eden, Evans, Fry and others were examined, and the case came out as clear as the day and black as the night.

When twelve honest Englishmen, men of plain sense, not men of system, men taken from the public not from public offices, sat in a circle with the corpse of a countryman at their knees, fiebat lux; ’twas as though twelve suns had burst into a dust-hole.

“Manslaughter!” cried they, and they sent their spokesman to the mayor and said yet more light must be let into this dusthole, and the mayor said, “Ay and it shall, too.  I will write to London and demand more light.”  And the men of the public went to their own homes and told their wives and children and neighbors what cruelties and villainies they had unearthed, and their hearers, being men and women of that people, which is a god in intellect and in heart compared with the criticasters that try to misguide it with their shallow guesses and cant and with the clerks that execute it in other men’s names, cried out, “See now!  What is the use our building courts of law or prisons unless they are to be open unto us.  Shut us out—­keep walls and closed gate between us and our servants—­and what comes of our courts of law and our prisons?  Why they turn nests of villainy in less than no time.”

The twelve honest Englishmen had hardly left the jail an hour, crying “manslaughter!” and crying “shame!” when all in a moment “TOMB!” fell a single heavy stroke of the great prison bell.  The heart of the prison leaped, and then grew cold—­a long chill pause, then “TOMB!” again.  The jurymen had told most of his fellow-sufferers how Josephs was driven into his grave—­and now—­

“TOMB!” the remorseless iron tongue crashed out one by one the last sad, stern monosyllables of this sorrowfulest of human tales.

They put him in his coffin ("TOMB!”) a boy of sixteen, who would be alive now but that caitiffs, whom God confound on earth, made life an impossibility to him ("TOMB!"), and that Shallows and Woodcocks, whom God confound on earth, and unconscientious non-inspecting inspectors, flunkeys, humbugs, hirelings, whom God confound on earth ("TOMB!"), left these scoundrels month after month and year after year unwatched, though largely paid by the queen and the people to watch them ("TOMB!").  Look on your work, hirelings, and listen to that bell, which would not be tolling now if you had been men of brains and scruples instead of sordid hirelings.  The priest was on his knees, praying for help from heaven to go through the last sad office with composure, for he feared his own heart