This must necessarily be valuable to the prosecutor and also convenient
to the court. I begin Mr. Percy's letter, then, at the point
when all three men were standing on the garden wall:--
"As I watched Hawkins wavering on the wall, I made up my own mind
not to waver. A cloud of wrath was on my brain, like the cloud
of copper fog on the houses and gardens round. My decision was
violent and simple; yet the thoughts that led up to it were so
complicated and contradictory that I could not retrace them now.
I knew Hawkins was a kind, innocent gentleman; and I would have
given ten pounds for the pleasure of kicking him down the road.
That God should allow good people to be as bestially stupid as that--
rose against me like a towering blasphemy.
"At Oxford, I fear, I had the artistic temperament rather badly;
and artists love to be limited. I liked the church as a pretty pattern;
discipline was mere decoration. I delighted in mere divisions of time;
I liked eating fish on Friday. But then I like fish; and the fast
was made for men who like meat. Then I came to Hoxton and found men
who had fasted for five hundred years; men who had to gnaw fish because
they could not get meat--and fish-bones when they could not get fish.
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