that evening. »If you are sure it's me you want,«
he said to the officers, who waited outside with the warrant for his arrest on a
charge of High Treason, »I am ready to accompany you« - which he did without
resistance. He was conducted first before the Privy Council, and afterwards to
the Horse Guards, and then was taken by way of Westminster Bridge, and back over
London Bridge (for the purpose of avoiding the main streets), to the Tower,
under the strongest guard ever known to enter its gates with a single prisoner.
    Of all his forty thousand men, not one remained to bear him company.
Friends, dependents, followers, - none were there. His fawning secretary had
played the traitor; and he whose weakness had been goaded and urged on by so
many for their own purposes, was desolate and alone.
 

                                 Chapter LXXIV

Mr. Dennis, having been made prisoner late in the evening, was removed to a
neighbouring round-house for that night, and carried before a justice for
examination on the next day, Saturday. The charges against him being numerous
and weighty, and it being in particular proved, by the testimony of Gabriel
Varden, that he had shown a special desire to take his life, he was committed
for trial. Moreover he was honoured with the distinction of being considered a
chief among the insurgents, and received from the magistrate's lips the
complimentary assurance that he was in a position of imminent danger, and would
do well to prepare himself for the worst.
    To say that Mr. Dennis's modesty was not somewhat startled by these honours,
or that he was altogether prepared for so flattering a reception, would be to
claim for him a greater amount of stoical philosophy than even he possessed.
Indeed this gentleman's stoicism was of that not uncommon kind, which enables a
man to bear with exemplary fortitude the afflictions of his friends, but renders
him, by way of counterpoise, rather selfish and sensitive in respect of any that
happen to befall himself. It is therefore no disparagement to the great officer
in question to state, without disguise or concealment, that he was at first very
much alarmed, and that he betrayed divers emotions of fear, until his reasoning
powers came to his relief, and set before him a more hopeful prospect.
    In proportion as Mr. Dennis exercised these intellectual qualities with
which he was gifted, in reviewing his best chances of coming off handsomely and
with small personal inconvenience, his spirits rose, and his confidence
increased. When he remembered the great estimation in