"There, if ever, spoke the 'human devil' in a black cap!
"I find another case of a sentence of transportation for life on a youth of 18, named Edward Baker, for stealing a pocket-handkerchief. Had he pleaded guilty it might have been worse for him.
"At the Salisbury Spring Assizes, 1830, Mr. Justice Gazalee, addressing the grand jury, said that none of the crimes appeared to be marked with circumstances of great moral turpitude. The prisoners numbered 130; he passed sentences of death on twenty-nine, life transportations on five, fourteen years on five, seven years on eleven, and various terms of hard labour on the others." (A Shepherd's Life, pp. 241-4.)
Johnnie Budd was done to death before my principal informants, one 89 years old, the other 93, were born; but in their early years they knew the widow and her three children, and had known them and their children all their lives; thus the whole story of Johnnie and Marty was familiar to them. Now, when I thought of Johnnie's case and how he was treated at the trial, as it was told me by these old people, it struck me as so like that of the poor young man Read, who was hanged because he pleaded guilty, that I at once came to the belief that it was Mr. Justice Park who had tried him. I have accordingly searched the newspapers of that day, but have failed to find Johnnie's case. I can only suppose that this particular case was probably considered too unimportant to be reported at large in the newspapers of 1821. He was just one of a number convicted and sentenced to capital punishment.
When Johnnie was hanged his poor wife travelled to Salisbury and succeeded in getting permission to take the body back to the village for burial. How she in her poverty, with her three little children to keep, managed it I don't know. Probably some of the other poor villagers who pitied and perhaps loved her helped her to do it. She did even more: she had a grave-stone set above him with his name and the dates of his birth and death cut on it. And there it is now, within a dozen yards of the church door in the small old churchyard—the smallest village churchyard known to me; and Johnnie's and Marty's children's children are still living in the village.
FINIS
THE WORKS OF W. H. HUDSON
BIRDS OF LA PLATA
With 22 Coloured Plates by H. Gronvold, specially drawn under the Author's supervision.