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LXVII.
ECCE AMARITUDO MEA AMARISSIMA.
We were frightened by the report that a gang of red-coats were sinking a large pit in the Camp.
"Are they going to bury us alive without any flogging? That's not half so merciful as Haynau's rule in Austria;" was my observation to a mate prisoner——a shrewd Irishman.
"Where did you read in history that the British Lion was ever merciful to a fallen foe?" was his sorrowfully earnest reply.
Oh! days and nights of the 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th of December, 1854, your remembrance will not end, no, not even in my grave.
They were happy days in my youth, when I thought with Rousseau, that the heart of man is from nature good. It was a sad fatality now that compelled me to feel the truth from the prophet Isaiah, that the heart of man is desperately wicked.
I was really thunderstruck at the savage eagerness with which spies and red-coats sprang out of their ranks to point me out. Though a British soldier was not ashamed to swear and confess his cowardice of running away from before my pike, which I never had on the stockade, where the fellow never could have seen me; I shall not prostitute my intelligence and comment on the "evidence" against me from a gang of bloodthirsty mercenary spies. The printer will copy my trial from the public newspaper, The Age.
LXVIII.
CONDEMN THE WICKED, AND BRING HIS WAY UPON HIS HEAD, OH, LORD GOD OF ISRAEL!
The first witness against me was such a rum sort of old colonial bird of the jackass tribe, and made such a fool of himself for Her Majesty's dear sake, about the monster meeting, where as it appeared, he had voluntered as reporter of the Camp; that now God has given him his reward. He is a gouty cripple, still on, "Her Majesty's fodder" at the Camp, Ballaarat.
Who will sharpen my quill and poison my inkstand, that I may put to confusion the horrible brood of red-tape that ruled on Ballaarat at the time. To administer justice in the sacred name of
