"Is this fair? is this generous?" asked Edric. "If we have done wrong, let our crime be proved, and we are ready to submit to any punishment you may think proper to inflict; but do not condemn us unheard. In England, every man is deemed innocent until he be proved guilty. You boast of having imported and improved upon all the useful regulations of the mother country, and cannot surely have omitted her most glorious law. Let us then have a fair trial, and God forbid that the course of justice should be impeded."
"You talk well, Sir," said the judge; "but it's of no use here. My chair, Sir, is made of witch-elm, and the whole court is lined with consecrated wood; so you may take your familiars to another market, for here they will avail you nothing."
"Good God!" exclaimed Edric, wringing his hands, "what ignorance! what gross superstition! And yet, in this man's power are our lives!"
"Oh! oh!" said the judge, who saw his despair, though he did not exactly know the cause; "I have brought you to, have I? Yes, yes; I tell you, no incantations will be of any avail here; and so, clerk, call the witnesses—"
The first person examined was the man who had been left in charge of the balloon, and he deposed as follows:—"Why, Sir," said he, scratching his head, as though he supposed wisdom dwelt in his fingers, and that their touch might give a little to his brain, "your honour told me to call out the posse comitatus, and set a guard of constables over the gentlemen's whirligig; but I thought as how, seeing it was but a queer-looking thing, and not likely to tempt anybody to steal it, I might as well save the gentlemen from throwing their money away upon a parcel of idle fellows, and keep watch over it myself."
"And so get the reward instead of them," observed the judge.
"Why, your honour," said the fellow, grinning, "I thought they might give something that might do me some good, but that it would be nothing amongst so many."
"Very true!" remarked the judge; "Go on Gregory."
"Well," continued Gregory, "as I was sitting there, thinking of nothing at all, and somehow, I believe, I had fallen into a bit of a doze, I heard a queer sort of a buzzing, and I opened my eyes, and there I saw the gentlemen's whirligig buzzing and puffing like a steam-engine on fire, and i' th' midst o' the smoke I'll take my oath I saw the mummy of King Cheops as plain as I see his worship there sitting in his throne."
"Oh!" groaned the horror-struck crowd; "Oh!" groaned the judge and jury.