Read "Mr. Justice Harbottle" by Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
People remarked that the Judge was in the vapours. His doctor said he should go for a fortnight to Buxton.
Whenever the Judge fell into a brown study, he was always conning over the terms of the sentence pronounced upon him in his vision -- "in one calendar month from the date of this day; " and then the usual form, "and you shall be hanged by the neck till you are dead," etc. "That will be the 10th -- I'm not much in the way of being hanged. I know what stuff dreams are, and I laugh at them; but this is continually in my thoughts, as if it forecast misfortune of some sort. I wish the day my dream gave me were passed and over. I wish I were well purged of my gout. I wish I were as I used to be. 'Tis nothing but vapours, nothing but a maggot. " The copy of the parchment and letter which had announced his trial with many a snort and sneer he would read over and over again, and the scenery and people of his dream would rise about him in places the most unlikely, and steal him in a moment from all that surrounded him into a world of shadows.