Book the Second - the Golden Thread
3. III. A Disappointment
(continued)
He answered, in a tone that went to every heart, "A long imprisonment."
"Were you newly released on the occasion in question?"
"They tell me so."
"Have you no remembrance of the occasion?"
"None. My mind is a blank, from some time--I cannot even say what time--
when I employed myself, in my captivity, in making shoes,
to the time when I found myself living in London with my dear
daughter here. She had become familiar to me, when a gracious God
restored my faculties; but, I am quite unable even to say how she
had become familiar. I have no remembrance of the process."
Mr. Attorney-General sat down, and the father and daughter sat down together.
A singular circumstance then arose in the case. The object in hand
being to show that the prisoner went down, with some fellow-plotter
untracked, in the Dover mail on that Friday night in November five
years ago, and got out of the mail in the night, as a blind, at a
place where he did not remain, but from which he travelled back some
dozen miles or more, to a garrison and dockyard, and there collected
information; a witness was called to identify him as having been at
the precise time required, in the coffee-room of an hotel in that
garrison-and-dockyard town, waiting for another person. The prisoner's
counsel was cross-examining this witness with no result, except that
he had never seen the prisoner on any other occasion, when the wigged
gentleman who had all this time been looking at the ceiling of the
court, wrote a word or two on a little piece of paper, screwed it up,
and tossed it to him. Opening this piece of paper in the next pause,
the counsel looked with great attention and curiosity at the prisoner.
"You say again you are quite sure that it was the prisoner?"
The witness was quite sure.
"Did you ever see anybody very like the prisoner?"
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