to return to earth as a ghost, and there remain until the evil consequences of my lapses of duty had fully worked themselves out. This, they calculated, would amount to a sentence of about seven thousand years. There was no option of a fine, while my request for leave to appeal for a mandamus was dismissed with costs. My sentence also provided that I should be compelled to assist in all the crimes resulting from my own leniency, and should be powerless to prevent them by warning the sufferers or the authorities. And," concluded the unhappy spectre, sobbing aloud, "here I am, s'elp me!"
The two burglars were really touched, for they had loved Lord Justice Pimblekin as a true and valuable friend. They knew him to have been an old gentleman whose abhorrence of the vulgarity of crime had been equalled by his sensitive horror of illiterate, vulgar, or slangy speech; and they thus, to a certain extent, understood the painful nature of his present position, for the involuntary use of the idiom and ways of the society in which he was now condemned to mix was a part of his sentence.
Far into the night the judge sat smoking his short spectral pipe and drinking from an unsubstantial pewter pot, while he listened, shuddering, to the plans of the two burglars for the carrying out of their crime. With growing horror he gradually gleaned that the crib to be cracked was the house of his twin brother the Bishop of Hampstead, a lonely mansion near the village of Highgate.
He watched the two malefactors as they cleaned and loaded their revolvers and made other preparations for the expedition. If that judge had done his duty, these two would still have been working out their time for the last crime but seven which they had committed; whereas Lord Pimblekin had let them off for that job with three months, and visited their subsequent deeds with penalties which decreased at a constant ratio, until for the latest—burglarious entry, removal of property valued at £500, wilful destruction of other property valued at £5,000, and maiming of two policemen and one footman—he had given them seven days.
Now, it happened that there had been for the last year or so before the disappearance of Justice Pimblekin a disagreement of a somewhat painful nature between himself and his twin brother the Bishop of Hampstead.
Both were old gentlemen of the utmost purity and philanthropy of principle, to whom the injuring of anyone—especially a brother—would have been an idea of the utmost horror.
Besides this, their mutual affection was really very strong; but they had quarrelled about a matter of principle—a mere trifle: whether a piece of toast should be buttered
