irons on their legs - irons of a pattern that I knew well. They
wore the dress that I likewise knew well. Their keeper had a brace
of pistols, and carried a thick-knobbed bludgeon under his arm; but
he was on terms of good understanding with them, and stood, with
them beside him, looking on at the putting-to of the horses, rather
with an air as if the convicts were an interesting Exhibition not
formally open at the moment, and he the Curator. One was a taller
and stouter man than the other, and appeared as a matter of course,
according to the mysterious ways of the world both convict and
free, to have had allotted to him the smaller suit of clothes. His
arms and legs were like great pincushions of those shapes, and his
attire disguised him absurdly; but I knew his half-closed eye at
one glance. There stood the man whom I had seen on the settle at
the Three Jolly Bargemen on a Saturday night, and who had brought
me down with his invisible gun!

It was easy to make sure that as yet he knew me no more than if he
had never seen me in his life. He looked across at me, and his eye
appraised my watch-chain, and then he incidentally spat and said
something to the other convict, and they laughed and slued
themselves round with a clink of their coupling manacle, and looked
at something else. The great numbers on their backs, as if they
were street doors; their coarse mangy ungainly outer surface, as if
they were lower animals; their ironed legs, apologetically
garlanded with pocket-handkerchiefs; and the way in which all
present looked at them and kept from them; made them (as Herbert
had said) a most disagreeable and degraded spectacle.

But this was not the worst of it. It came out that the whole of the
back of the coach had been taken by a family removing from London,