Gridley,’ the Lord Chancellor told me last week, ‘not to waste your time here, and to stay, usefully employed, down in Shropshire.’ ‘My Lord, my Lord, I know it would,’ said I to him, ‘and it would have been far better for me never to have heard the name of your high office, but unhappily for me, I can’t undo the past, and the past drives me here!’ Besides,” he added, breaking fiercely out, “I’ll shame them. To the last, I’ll show myself in that court to its shame. If I knew when I was going to die, and could be carried there, and had a voice to speak with, I would die there, saying, ‘You have brought me here and sent me from here many and many a time. Now send me out feet foremost!’ ”

His countenance had, perhaps for years, become so set in its contentious expression that it did not soften, even now when he was quiet.

“I came to take these babies down to my room for an hour,” he said, going to them again, “and let them play about. I didn’t mean to say all this, but it don’t much signify. You’re not afraid of me, Tom, are you?”