that any body got off,
who was tried for robbing his majesty's mail. It is difficult to conceive the
lightness of heart which was communicated to me by these words: I persisted
however in the silence I had meditated. From the rest of their conversation,
which was sufficiently voluble, I learned that the mail from Edinburgh to London
had been robbed about ten days before by two Irishmen, that one of them was
already secured, and that I was taken up upon suspicion of being the other. They
had a description of his person which, though, as I afterwards found, it
disagreed from mine in several material articles, appeared to them to tally to
the minutest tittle. The intelligence that the whole proceeding against me was
founded in a mistake, took an oppressive load from my mind. I believed that I
should immediately be able to establish my innocence to the satisfaction of any
magistrate in the kingdom; and, though crossed in my plans, and thwarted in my
design of quitting the island even after I was already at sea, this was but a
trifling inconvenience compared with what I had had but too much reason to fear.
    As soon as we came ashore I was conducted to the house of a justice of
peace, a man who had formerly been the captain of a collier, but who, having
been successful in the world, had quitted this wandering life, and for some
years had had the honour to represent his majesty's person. We were detained for
some time in a sort of anti-room, waiting his reverence's leisure. The persons
by whom I had been taken up were experienced in their trade, and insisted upon
employing this interval in searching me, in presence of two of his worship's
servants. They found upon me fifteen guineas and some silver. They required me
to strip myself perfectly naked, that they might examine whether I had bank
notes concealed any where about my person. They took up the detached parcels of
my miserable attire as I threw it from me, and felt them one by one to discover
whether the articles of which they were in search might by any device be sewn up
in them. To all this I submitted without murmuring. It might probably come to
the same thing at last, and summary justice was sufficiently coincident with my
views, my principal object being to get as soon as possible out of the clutches
of the respectable persons who now had me in custody.
    This operation was scarcely completed, before we were directed to be ushered
into his worship's apartment. My accusers opened the charge, and