A patient’s POV
The events which so greatly affected the course of my existence occurred not long after I had attained my nineteenth year. My father, Sir Thomas Mart, was the greatest landowner in our part of the country. It happened at this time that we were plagued by poachers, which cost us many a good fowl. In their disregard of the law the miscreants had waxed so insolent that they had even attacked and injured one of our gamekeepers. After they were apprehended my father, as magistrate, ensured that they should be subject to the full majesty of the law, and they were sentenced to swing from the gallows at Bristol on the twentieth day of June in the year of our Lord 1838. At that time I was down on holiday from Oxford , where I was a student of Divinity, for, as my parents' second so
