"Where did you read in history that the British Lion was ever merciful to a fallen foe?" was his sorrowfully earnest reply.
Oh! days and nights of the 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th of December, 1854, your remembrance will not end, no, not even in my grave.
They were happy days in my youth, when I thought with Rousseau, that the heart of man is from nature good. It was a sad fatality now that compelled me to feel the truth from the prophet Isaiah, that the heart of man is desperately wicked.
I was really thunderstruck at the savage eagerness with which spies and red-coats sprang out of their ranks to point me out. Though a British soldier was not ashamed to swear and confess his cowardice of running away from before my pike, which I never had on the stockade, where the fellow never could have seen me; I shall not prostitute my intelligence and comment on the 'evidence' against me from a gang of bloodthirsty mercenary spies. The printer will copy my trial from the public newspaper, 'The Age'.
Chapter LXVIII.
Condemn The Wicked, And Bring His Way Upon His Head, Oh,
Lord God Of Israel!
The first witness against me was such a rum sort of old colonial bird of the jackass tribe, and made such a fool of himself for Her Majesty's dear sake, about the monster meeting, where as it appeared, he had volunteered as reporter of the Camp; that now God has given him his reward. He is a gouty cripple, still on 'Her Majesty's fodder' at the Camp, Ballaarat.
Who will sharpen my quill and poison my inkstand, that I may put to confusion the horrible brood of red-tape that ruled on Ballaarat at the time. To administer justice in the sacred name of Her Most Gracious Majesty, they squandered the sweat of self-over-working diggers, on a set of devils, such that they actually competed with one another, in vomiting like sick dogs! Their multitude was taken as a test of their veracity, on the Mosaical ground, that 'out of the mouth of two witnesses shall the guilty be condemned;' and yet, with the exception of spy Goodenough, and spy Peters, none other to my knowledge ever did see my face before.
I assert and declare as an honest man and a Christian, that my eyes never did see the witnesses against me, before I was under arrest at the Camp. My soul was drowned in an ocean of bitterness when of that brood of Satan, one did swear he had run from before my pike; another had fired at me, but his pistol 'snapped;' a third made me prisoner within the stockade; a fourth took me up chained to other prisoners who had surrendered, from the stockade to the Camp.
Such, then, is the perversity of the human heart! In vain did I point out to the sitting magistrate the absurdness of their evidence, and the fact that Sub-inspector Carter and Dr. Carr could prove the contradiction. I was so embittered and broken-hearted at the wickedness of so many infuriated mercenary rascals, that had made up their mind to sell the blood of an honest man, in as much as I had repeatedly told each and all of them, when they came to 'recognize' in our prison, that they must mistake me for another as I was not within the stockade that Sunday morning; that I…but it is too humiliating to say any more.