The case against the prisoner was full and complete, and nothing now remained but to pronounce him guilty, and sentence him to the penalty his crime required.

This duty the judge was proceeding to discharge, when at the door of the court was heard a commotion.

For a moment the judge's words were drowned in the shuffling of feet and the sound of voices; then the door opened, and in walked a youth, scarcely more than a boy, tall, slender, and handsome, with flushed cheeks and wild eye, fashionably dressed, with a sword at his side and a plumed hat upon his head.
"The Prince of Wales!" broke from the lips of a score of onlookers, as they recognised in that youth the heir to the crown, towards whose delinquencies their thoughts had that moment been turned.
He advanced gaily and recklessly to the bench, the crowd falling back on either side to give him passage.

As he passed the bar at which the prisoner stood awaiting his sentence, he stopped, and, nodding familiarly, exclaimed-- "What ho, comrade! I heard thou wast in trouble, and have come myself to ease thee; so cheer up, lad!" Then approaching the judge, he said, "Good Master Gascoigne, your prisoner is a friend of mine, too gay a comrade to languish in bonds for a trifling scrape like this.

Spare yourself, therefore, further pains on his account, and come, solace your gravity with a party of boon companions who assemble to-night to celebrate their hero's emancipation from your clutches!" Gravely and sorrowfully the judge regarded the prince who thus flippantly defied the law of which he was the guardian, but his face was firm and his voice authoritative as he replied-- "Prince, my duty is to defend the laws of the king, your father, not to break them.