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Her Most Gracious Majesty, they squandered the sweat of self-over-working diggers, on a set of devils, such that they actually competed with one another, in vomiting like sick dogs! Their multitude was taken as a test of their veracity, on the Mosaical ground, that "out of the mouth of two witnesses shall the guilty be condemned;" and yet, with the exception of spy Goodenough, and spy Peters, none other to my knowledge ever did see my face before.
I assert and declare as an honest man and a Christian, that my eyes never did see the witnesses against me, before I was under arrest at the Camp. My soul was drowned in an ocean of bitterness when of that brood of Satan, one did swear he had run from before my pike; another had fired at me, but his pistol "snapped;" a third made me prisoner within the stockade; a fourth took me up chained to other prisoners who had surrendered, from the stockade to the Camp.
Such, then, is the perversity of the human heart! In vain did I point out to the sitting magistrate the absurdness of their evidence, and the fact that Sub-inspector Carter, and Dr. Carr could prove the contradiction. I was so embittered and broken-hearted at the wickedness of so many infuriated mercenary rascals, that had made up their mind to sell the blood of an honest man, in as much as I had repeatedly told each and all of them, when they came to "recognize" in our prison, that they must mistake me for another as I was not within the stockade that Sunday morning; that I … but it is too humiliating to say any more.
Mr. Sturt, with an odious face, whose plumpness told me at once he was no friend to fasting, strutted to the magisterial chair, and committed me and the nigger-rebel, to whom I was kindly hobbled, to take our trial for high-treason!
LXIX.
VOX POPULI, VOX DEI.
In the course of the day (December 7th), in spite of all the bayonets and blunderbusses, the report reached us that the Melbourne people had had a Monster Meeting of their own, equal to ours of November 29th, and that Mr. Foster, the "Jesuit," had been dismissed from office.
