finding none come, he threw down the keeper's
train with disgust, and resolved to join the army
abroad. His friends soon procured him a
commission, and he served under Marlborough in
Flanders. The career suited his turbulent spirit,
and he acquired the reputation of a useful and
brave officer, having fought in several battles and
sieges, and received several wounds. The dark
side of his nature soon began to show itself.
He became quarrelsome and revengeful. He
had a duel at Bruges, outside the camp, with
an officer of horse. Oneby's wounded
antagonist died the next day. A court-martial was
held, but the duel having been considered
fair, Oneby was honourably acquitted, and was
now known among "people of honour" as a
duellist that had felled his man. He afterwards
fought a Lieutenant Tooley at Port
Royal, in Jamaica. Both combatants were
desperately wounded, but Tooley lingered for
eight months before he died. Oneby was never
brought to trial. By seniority Oneby had risen,
after twenty-two years' hard service, to the rank
of major in Honeywood's regiment of dragoons;
but the peace of Utrecht coming, the major had
to seek other roads to fortune, and Mercury
soon found him one covered with green cloth.

The major had still one virtue left. He had
courage. While the judges at Serjeants Inn
were deciding on his fate, he made extremely
merry, and kept high revel in Newgate over
smoking punch, drinking the healths of his
judges, who he boasted knew him to be a man
of honour, and resolved not to hurt him. In the
midst of his tipsy songs a good-natured friend,
whom he had known over the green cloth, entered
with a grisly oath, and swore that eleven of the
twelve judges had decided to bring it in WILFUL
MURDER. This struck down the hopes of the
roystering major as with a poleaxe. To use his
own confession, "it frightened him cursedly."
To lower him still more, and to hang, as it
were, his whole mind with black, two or three
men he had sent to watch and listen round
Serjeants Inn did not return that night to the
Ark, and this made his fears rise up like a
swelling sea. The fact was, that the judges,
having heard counsel on both sides, had broken
up about ten at night without declaring their
final opinion. No one, therefore, could speak
with certainty; but from small things that
leaked put through the lawyers' clerks and
porters, it was generally thought that the major
would be shortly cast for murder.

Oneby, shaking off his drunkenness, felt the
ground sinking under him; he called over the
roll of his few respectable friends before the
last desperate step of throwing himself on
the king's mercy, clinging, however, still to the
smallest hopes; as a man, finding a bush on
the cliff-side fail him as he climbs, snatches
at even a flower or at blades of grass. The
wretched man still flattered himself that the
judges might determine in his favour, till
one day the cell door opened, and the keeper
of Newgate entered, followed by a beetle-
browed jailer carrying a pile of heavy chains.
The order had come that the major was to be
double ironed. He was to have a man placed
in his room every night. The sense of having
once been a gentleman returned vividly to his
mind; he appeared much shocked, and was
eager to know whether any secret order of the
judges had arrived, or whether it arose from
some false information of his desire to escape.
He hoped the latter; but the keeper refused to
satisfy him, and ordered the jailer to at once
put on the irons. The rascal's heart gave way
at this degradation, and he burst into tears.

The person appointed to watch in the major's
room was a man named John Hooper, afterwards
the public executioner, an honest and faithful
fellow, who obtained his promotion "by pure
merit and without bribes," as a contemporaneous
paper says applaudingly. The major
expressed at first great horror at his hard,
malign face.

"What the d——" he said, in his old
blustering way, "do you bring this fellow here for?
Whenever I look at him I shall think of hanging."
But he soon grew reconciled when he
found Hooper was a mimic, a teller of ribald
stories, who could imitate the itinerant Methodists,
and joke, and describe all the humours
of the prison and the half wild beasts that
inhabited it.

Three weeks more of this cruel suspense and
wavering justice, and the gamester was brought
up to the King's Bench bar to receive the
judgment of the court. Lord Chief Justice
Raymond told him that the judges had
unanimously found him guilty of wilful murder, and
recapitulated to him their reasons. The
prisoner prayed to be recommended to his
Majesty's clemency for his long and faithful
services in the army. The judges turned stony
faces upon the miserable man. As to mercy,
he must, they said, apply for that elsewhere;
where he stood now was only a court of justice.
Formal sentence of death was, at last, passed
upon him, and his execution ordered for the
4th of July.

He had exhausted his London friends; he
must now go himself, like the prodigal son
returning from a far country, and sue to his
Leicestershire friends. He wrote abjectly to
them, begging their pardon for past follies,
and entreating them to come up and help him.
Some did relent; but the major's old haughtiness
resisted all rebukes, and one relation left
Newgate and instantly posted home. A cousin only
continued with him faithfully, from real pity,
till his death. That one lingering friend,
perhaps, proved that there was still some redeeming
point left in a bad man. The major had
boasted largely of the noblemen he had known
in Flanders and met at gambling-tables; but
his friends, on inquiring, found no one who
would speak for him, or even deliver his petition.

Flesh flies live on corruption. Grub-street
had unanimously resolved to turn a penny by
the major. About a week before his death, a
street pamphlet was published, entitled The