But all this would have been nothing had not Nickem secured the old woman who had sold the herrings,—­and also the chemist, from whom the strychnine had been purchased as much as three years previously.  This latter feat was Nickem’s great triumph, the feeling of the glory of which induced him to throw up his employment in Mr. Masters’ office, and thus brought him and his family to absolute ruin within a few months in spite of the liberal answers which were made by Lord Rufford to many of his numerous appeals.  Away in Norrington the poison had been purchased as much as three years ago, and yet Nickem had had the luck to find it out.  When the Scrobbyites heard that Scrobby had gone all the way to Norrington to buy strychnine to kill rats they were Scrobbyites no longer.  “I hope they’ll hang ’un.  I do hope they’ll hang ’un,” said Mr. Runce quite out loud from his crowded seat just behind the attorney’s bench.

The barrister of course struggled hard to earn his money.  Though he could not save his client he might annoy the other side.  He insisted therefore on bringing the whole affair of the pheasants before the Court, and examined the Senator at great length.  He asked the Senator whether he had not found himself compelled to sympathise with the wrongs he had witnessed.  The Senator declared that he had witnessed no wrongs.  Why then had he interfered?  Because he had thought that there might be wrong, and because he wished to see what power a poor man in this country would have against a rich one.  He was induced still to think that Goarly had been ill-treated about the pheasants;—­but he could not take upon himself to say that he had witnessed any wrong done.  But he was quite sure that the system on which such things were managed in England was at variance with that even justice which prevailed in his own country!  Yes;—­by his own country he did mean Mickewa.  He could tell that learned gentleman in spite of his sneers, and in spite of his evident ignorance of geography, that nowhere on the earth’s surface was justice more purely administered than in the great Western State of Mickewa.  It was felt by everybody that the Senator had the best of it.  Mr. Scrobby was sent into durance for twelve months with hard labour, and Goarly was conveyed away in the custody of the police lest he should be torn to pieces by the rough lovers of hunting who were congregated outside.  When the sentence had reached Mr. Runce’s ears, and had been twice explained to him, first by one neighbour and then by another, his face assumed the very look which it had worn when he carried away his victuals from the Senator’s side at Rufford Hall, and when he had turned his pony round on his own land on the previous evening.  The man had killed a fox and might have killed a dozen hounds, and was to be locked up only for twelve months!  He indignantly asked his neighbour what had come of Van Diemen’s land, and what was the use of Botany Bay.

On their way back to Rufford Hall, Lord Rufford would have been triumphant, had not the Senator checked him.  “It’s a bad state of things altogether,” he said.  “Of course the promiscuous use of strychnine is objectionable.”