If I were allowed to tell my tale to the Parliament in London, what might not happen to them, they wondered--to them who had ventured to pass sentence of death upon a subject of the Queen of Great Britain?
Might not this turn the scale against them?
Might not Britain arise in wrath and crush them, these men who dared to invoke her forms of law in order to kill her citizen?
Those, as I learned afterwards, were the thoughts that passed through their minds.
Also another thought passed through their minds--that if the sentence were executed at once, a dead man cannot appeal, and that here I had no friends to take up my cause and avenge me.

But of all this they said nothing.

Only at a sign I was marched away to my little house and imprisoned under guard.
Now I propose to tell the rest of the history of these tragic events as they happened, although some of them did not come to my knowledge till the morrow or afterwards, for I think this will be the more simple and the easier plan..