"Now laugh for ever!"
And he himself began to laugh.
This second laugh, wilder yet than the first, might have been taken for a sob.
The laughed ceased, and the man lay back. His eyelids closed.
The sheriff, who had allowed the prisoner to speak, resumed,—
"All which is placed on record."
He gave the secretary time to write, and then said,—
"Hardquanonne, by the terms of the law, after confrontation followed by identification, after the third reading of the declarations of your accomplices, since confirmed by your recognition and confession, and after your renewed avowal, you are about to be relieved from these irons, and placed at the good pleasure of her Majesty to be hung as plagiary."
"Plagiary," said the serjeant of the coif. "That is to say, a buyer and seller of children. Law of the Visigoths, seventh book, third section, paragraph Usurpaverit, and Salic law, section the forty-first, paragraph the second, and law of the Frisons, section the twenty-first, Deplagio; and Alexander Nequam says,—
"'Qui pueros vendis, plagiarius est tibi nomen.'"