consciences to deliver and to declare to us by your verdict the
truth of the facts."

Upon that he proceeded to his summing-up, showing how Baynes and
Blood were both guilty of treason, the first for having harboured
a traitor, the second for having succoured that traitor by dressing
his wounds. He interlarded his address by sycophantic allusions
to his natural lord and lawful sovereign, the King, whom God had
set over them, and with vituperations of Nonconformity and of
Monmouth, of whom - in his own words - he dared boldly affirm that
the meanest subject within the kingdom that was of legitimate birth
had a better title to the crown. "Jesus God! That ever we should
have such a generation of vipers among us," he burst out in
rhetorical frenzy. And then he sank back as if exhausted by the
violence he had used. A moment he was still, dabbing his lips again;
then he moved uneasily; once more his features were twisted by pain,
and in a few snarling, almost incoherent words he dismissed the jury
to consider the verdict.

Peter Blood had listened to the intemperate, the blasphemous, and
almost obscene invective of that tirade with a detachment that
afterwards, in retrospect, surprised him. He was so amazed by the
man, by the reactions taking place in him between mind and body,
and by his methods of bullying and coercing the jury into bloodshed,
that he almost forgot that his own life was at stake.

The absence of that dazed jury was a brief one. The verdict found
the three prisoners guilty. Peter Blood looked round the
scarlet-hung court. For an instant that foam of white faces seemed
to heave before him. Then he was himself again, and a voice was