Read They Hanged My Saintly Billy for Free Online

timber, from which half the Royal Navy's dockyards are supplied. Oaks, Sir, with trunks as big around as cart wheels! Then there's my Lord Bagot's—the finest woods in Europe, Lord Bagot's got. And Earl Talbot's magnificent estate, which has named both our oldest inn and our principal hotel; and Weston Hall; and a hundred such. Bless you, Sir, compared with Rugeley, Nottinghamshire's a fool to it. Then there's Hagley Hall within a hop, skip, stride and j ump of us—a short mile in fact— the finest shrubberies man ever saw, and the Honourable Mr Curzon is so kind as to allow us all to walk in them. It's only this plaguey Dr Palmer has set people against Rugeley; or else the whole world would be singing its praises.'
    Retrace your steps at this point, and go back by way of Market Square to the other end ot the town, where The Shoulder of Mutton Inn stands, an inn no larger than a cottage. Thomas Clewley, a fine-looking man with white hair and a cherry-face which puts one in mind of trifle at some evening party, has been landlord here for more years, he says, than he would care to reckon. The inn has a tall roof from winch dormer windows peep out across the street and over its entrance door hangs a crude painting of an immense shoulder of mutton, dwarfing the very respectably sized dried hams seen suspended from the kitchen hooks as one glances in through the passage window. The front parlour is lined with shelves containing what seem to be medicine bottles but are, in reality, travellers' samples of various wines, cordials and spirits. There is also on view the plaster image of a cow, such as grace dairymen's shops, or Hindoo temples, with the following Gothic inscription sunk in its base:' No Milk like Bristol Milk!'
    The tap-room is built out from the side of the cottage, with a slate roof of its own; the windows have heavy white sashes and small panes, twelve to the square yard; broadsheet ballads and hand-coloured prints of pugilists, murderers and racehorses paper the walls. On a shelf over the door stands a bottle containing a two-headed piglet preserved in spirits of wine; and scrawled across the face of a broken American hanging clock, above a coloured view of Sharon Church, Connecticut, you may read the jocose warning: 'No tick here!'
    Mr Clewley is even less reluctant to discuss the 'Palmer affair' than old Littler, and equally positive about the Doctor's innocence. We have taken down the following from his lips, in shorthand.
    thomas clewley
    Palmer never had it in him to hurt a fly. The way they now talk of him in the London papers, and in towns where he was barely known, nigh makes me vomit! I reckon Littler has given you the particulars of his two false starts in life—at Liverpool and at Haywood—and how he was twice deceived by that foxy-maned harlot, Jane Widnall. But he never tells the whole story, on account of loyalty to his employer, Mrs Palmer Senior.
    The fact is, that when the poor lady had buried Mr Joseph Palmer Senior under a fine stone vault in the graveyard, she began to feel lonely and cold at nights. She would have married again, being a lively, handsome enough woman—as 'tis said coarsely in this town: 'Many's the good tune played on an old fiddle'—but that the deed drawn up by her eldest son Joseph forbade this . It's my suspicion that Mr Joseph Junior knew of a certain attachment she had formed on the very day of the funeral, and did not relish her beau as a stepfather; the man, Moody by name, had once been a collier, and was now managing the pit at Brereton for him. That danger passed, since Moody soon after got knocked over by a railway train when his horse bolted across the lines. But I'm sure that, a few years later, if Mrs Palmer had been free to follow her inclinations, she would have married Cornelius Duffy, the linen-draper. I don't suppose Littler said much about that business, did he? Very well, Sir: I'll tell you the story just as it happened.
    Duffy was a strapping fellow of