The judge and barristers, in their wigs and robes and
gowns, were unlike any human beings he had ever looked on. He might have
been transported to some other world, so strange did the whole scene
appear to him. He only knew, or surmised, that all these important
people were occupied in doing him to death, but the process, the meaning
of their fine phrases, he could not follow. He looked at them, his
glazed eyes travelling from face to face, to be fixed finally on the
judge, in a vacant stare; but he scarcely saw them, he was all the time
gazing on, and his mind occupied with, other forms and scenes invisible
to the court. His village, his Marty, his dear little playmate of long
ago, the sweet girl he had won, the wife and mother of his children,
with her white, terrified face, clinging to him and crying in anguish:
"Oh, Johnnie, what will they do to 'ee?" And all the time, with it all,
he saw the vast green slope of the down, with the Salisbury road lying
like a narrow white band across it, and close to it, near the summit,
the solitary old tree.
During the delivery of the sentence, and when he was led from the dock
and conveyed back to the prison, that image or vision was still present.
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