The Jury therefore gave this verdict with deliberate intention. It meant prison and slow starvation and insufficient warmth, and so everybody instantly understood, including Mr. Jones himself. In a moment the officers would have laid hands upon the unhappy but undeserving footman. But he was too quick for them: he turned: he fled: he hurled himself down Westminster Hall through the crowd of lawyers, witnesses, booksellers, glovesellers, and visitors: he tore across New Palace Yard, now pursued by the officers: he made for the 'Bridge,' that is, the pier so called, for as yet there was no Bridge: he jumped into the first boat and shoved off. When the bailiffs arrived breathless at the Stairs, they saw their prisoner already half way across the river. They too jumped into a boat: for some reason or other--one knows not why--it was most unlucky--their boat took a long time to get off: something was wrong with the painter: the ropes were knotted: the stretchers wanted to be set right: the oars were on the wrong sides: the men were slow in getting off their coats: finally, when she was cast loose the boat proved to be another Noah's Ark for creeping slowly over the face of the waters. Jones therefore got safely ashore on the other side, and the bailiffs turned back with a good deal of cursing. Once ashore, the fugitive made straight to Mint Street, as to a Levitical City which was also a City of Refuge. I know not what became of him afterwards. It was a hive where all the bees were busy. Jones could not eat the bread of idleness: he therefore, one may certainly conclude, became a rogue by profession and in due course met his fate bravely with white ribbons round his cap, an orange in one hand, a Prayer-book in the other, and a large nosegay in his shirt front.
Here is another story of the same Eighteenth Century Sanctuary. It will seem incredible that the Executive should have been so incapable, but the story is literally true.
Things being in so satisfactory and settled a condition, the Law being so triumphantly defied, at the Mint in Southwark, some of the residents or collegians naturally desired to go farther afield, and to establish more Sanctuaries or Law-defying colonies on the other side of the river, which was reported to be ripe for these settlements. No reports of Meetings, Proceedings, and Resolutions held and passed on the subject have come down to us. However, that matters very little. Every great movement, we know, is the work of one man. Therefore there arose a Prophet--the Prophet as Rogue. He perceived, understood, and presently began to preach that a 'long felt want'--call it rather a 'need'--existed, which it was his duty to supply. The old Sanctuaries of North London, he pointed out, had fallen into decay. Alsatia was deplorably respectable: bailiffs had been seen in Milford Lane: the trade of counterfeit rings was no longer carried on in St. Martin's. And, though there were certainly taverns in Clerkenwell which bailiffs regarded with a useful respect, it could not be denied that London needed a new Sanctuary. This need he called upon his friends and fellow-residents in the Mint to supply. He set before his hearers with burning eloquence--I am sure it was burning--a Vision of a New London, Purged; Purified; without honesty; without morals; without law; with neither gallows, pillory, whipping post, or stocks: a City entirely in the hands of Rogues who would compel all the conquered City to work for them: would seize on all property and would live triumphantly happy with complete control over all the Prisons. To make a beginning of this Millennium, he proposed, by means of colonies from the Mint, to plant all London with Sanctuaries until, in fulness of time, the City should become one huge Sanctuary, where debts would never be collected, and robbery and murder would never be punished.