October, 1861
I sit here before you unjustly accused. I sit here at your mercy, reader.
We three sit before you, a congress of rogues, and all our fates are intertwined.
In the days leading up to our spurious trial, with summer skulking into fall, in different branches of the cross that made the Suffolk County Jail, Hannah, Guay and I sat waiting—mute, incoordinate, fearing the worst. Hannah was on the women’s wing while Guay and I slumped either side of the men’s, though the bumpkin and I might’ve been different sexes for all we were allowed to talk.
Apart from my counsel, Mr. Townsend, who’d been appointed by the State, I suffered to receive no one and no one paid me mind by mail, though Boston’s papers proved adept at meditating on our straits. Every day without fail there’d be Hannah and me, and, boxed in a column adjacent the bumpkin, the scores and notations of Civil War dead beginning to play second horn to us rotting. The only ones of us still free were Bill Christian and Hannah’s mother.
Yet I was a lever, while Bill was a cog. Bill Christian got frisked while I reigned in the Globe—but couldn’t they be cruel sometimes, calling me Mumbler, and Mummer, and Juggler, prodding at my tender name with keen, commercial impishness. And so while Bill of Beacon Hill of little moment walked the streets, it was I, Willy Mumler of Newspaper Row, photographer of ghastly marvels, who bent his head into a storm of rapists, pickpockets, cardsharps and abusers—in a ten by four space where the sunlight itself, shining raggedly into the arms of the cross, had not the slightest character, the slightest touch of heaven in it. There was always one man, all night long, who keened for just a sip of something and always another, when this man was done, who called to the guard in a seethe of invective. And forever the knocking of implements, scratching, the grunting of a hundred apes, those sad and headstrong bouts of sound that men fallen into the sere will enact.
But I remained completely still.
I wanted to conserve my strength. You see, I wished to feel prepared—stacked up to the task of defending myself—and short of running round my cell or doing smaller calisthenics, which every time I tried to do reduced me to a huffing mound, I determined to sit there, enormously silent, pondering my circumstances.
Yet I did not consider long. Soon the trial was on, full swing.
The state’s contention was preposterous. May it please the court, indeed.
Elbridge T. Gerry, the State’s prosecutor, with whiskers as full as the Marshall was bald, promenaded back and forth with thespian flair before the court.
“May it please the court,” said Gerry, “before stating my case in behalf of the people that we the Commonwealth commend the wide latitude that His Judgeship has shown to the hollow transgressions of William H. Mumler. Your mercy is not strained, My Lord. Nor ere was mercy ever so. But plummeteth down through the mists of its maker to soak into the ground below. And so it blesseth he that gives and he that takes in equal reach.”
Gerry smiled to hear his words—The Merchant of Venice, I believe.
He took a pass around the court. The eminence to which he spoke, a little pressed bug of a man with black hair, nodded his mandibles once and twitched sagely on top of his pulpit surmounting the court.
“A most embroidered quote, My Lord, but also suited to the day. Not only in content, concerning Your Honour, but also in style of delivery, I think. For isn’t this Mumler an able embroiderer—and so his apprentices, here in our dock? Have they not taken common portraits—common as the Bard’s adage—and outfitted them in the cheap metaphysics that are the bugbear of our age? And have they not taken advantage …” he spouted.
Sound and fury, on and on.
They brought a so-called expert first: the old wizard himself, Bogardus.
He was just as I’d pictured him, fatter perhaps, with a white mane of hair like a dowager’s blanket and a big bushy widower’s beard, just as white. It was as though his very life were locked in strife with fickle Fashion—as though it would’ve pained the man to dignify a court of law. And in this spirit he went on to hold forth on his breadth of knowing, specifically as to nine methods, in name, by which I might’ve forged my prints:
One. By inserting a positive plate with a previous image in front of a clean one, so that when the latter came into the completion, the first plate’s residual image still showed.
Two. By introducing for a quarter-of-a-minute a fleeting figure clothed in white (for instance, Mrs. Britten’s girl) who flees before the plate is done, deploying a shadowy visage behind her.
Three. By the crafting and clever concealment of a microscopic image of the revenant sought in one of the camera’s four screw-holes, which is then magnified by a proximate lens and projected to proportion on the surface of the plate.
Four. By concealing by way of the hand a spirit-haunted mica positive and inserting this plate in the shield mid-exposure to achieve the “foggy dumplings” the spirits recalled …
Yet to name only four is to name four too many. You heard what Gerry said of mercy.
But on to Bogardus’ words about Child—a really, very damning bunch:
“Is it true,” Gerry said, “that in this city here in the year of 1856 that Algernon Child was your life drawing student at the Boston Institute of Art?”
“That is so,” said Bogardus.
“Were the two of you close?”
“As a student and teacher may be,” said Bogardus.
“Forgive me,” said Gerry, “my ignorance, sir, but how close might that be? Please, teach us!”
A breeze of laughter swept the court.
“Affinity,” Bogardus said. “We have an affinity, each for the other. I felt—and still feel—great affection for him in spite of his unstudied technical hand.”
“He was no good at drawing, then?”
“Well he wasn’t quite average,” said Bogardus. “And yet he was dauntless. Ineptly inspired. His hunger to learn—it was that which endeared me.”
“And continues today to endear you?” said Gerry. “I noticed you said, sir—and here see to record—that you felt and still feel great affection for Child. Which choice of words would then imply that he is still among the living?”
“Oh, very much so!” said Bogardus, “the wretch. I saw him just the other day.”
“Once again”—Gerry smiled—“might you be more specific?”
“This Wednesday past,” Bogardus said. “He came to inquire on a technical matter. He was looking rather well in fact—weaning from the bottle likely—and yes, I remember distinctly,” he said, his finger raised before the court, “that he came to my rooms around five in the evening.”
“Might you tell us then,” said Gerry, “the nature of the thing he asked?”
“He wanted to know how to make spirit pictures.” A murmur stirred the gallery. “He wanted to know how this Mumler here did it.”
“He could not figure it himself?”
“As I said,” said Bogardus, “he is not hugely able. Hardly what you’d call a natural. Smart enough in other ways—intellectually smart, you might say—but not technically.”
“Do you mean to imply, sir, that you were surprised that Child could not achieve such pictures?”
“I was somewhat,” Bogardus said. “Most of the methods I named are deductible.”
Then tardily, slowly, at blessed long last: “Defence objects,” said Counsellor Townsend. “My Lord, what bearing can this have on the fact of Mr. Child’s aliveness?”
“Overruled, Mr. Townsend,” His Beetle-ship said. “Mr. Bogardus, continue right on.”
“I thank you, Your Honour,” Bogardus said levelly. “By deductible, sir, I only meant that the process is no unattainable feat.”
“And did you inform him of one of these methods?”
“Why I did more than that,” he said. “I not only told him the methods, all nine—I stepped him through how they were done face to face.”
“You effected all nine of the methods yourself?”
“We only had time for some four,” said Bogardus. “The double exposure, the miniscule plate, the dumpling effect and the compromised nitrate. The lady in white, you’ll understand, required a bit more preparation. And anyway”—a brooding pause—“Child was disinclined to do it.”
“The lady in white, did you say?” inquired Gerry. “The one that needs an actor for it?”
“That is the one,” Bogardus said.
“A bit more preparation, how?”
“For one,” he said, “a willing body. Two bodies, ideally—a foil and a sitter. The sitter, well, to sit of course while the plate is exposed in the back of the box, the foil to interrupt the scene in such a way his form is captured.”
“Captured ghostly,” Gerry said, at which Bogardus nodded once. “And why do you think Child himself wasn’t willing to be the actor in this case?”
“I’d think that he was very tired.”
The counsellor smiled. “Tired, sir. From what?”
“From being Mr. Mumler’s ghost.”
An excitable muttering burned through the courtroom. Townsend said, “Defence object—”
“—you’re overruled,” Judge Dowling roared and continued to hunch further toward the proceedings.
It was all, as I’d thought, a preposterous joke. Its logic tangled up in me, a strenuous and stiff unraveling, while the actual murder of Child, as we’d lived it, had been so sudden—been so simple!
“From being Mr. Mumler’s ghost. That is what you said,” said Gerry. “By which you mean, I take it, sir, that Child and Mumler are in league. That Child is Mumler’s ghostly lady—or ghostly gentleman, let’s say—who in his wretched poverty, and in his lack of natural skill had been so reduced as to prostrate himself upon the needs of this man here?”
“That is,” he said, “what I believe. The compositions show as much.”
“The compositions of the prints?”
Bogardus nodded. “See to them. Observe the way the figure stands. Unlike the other ghosts, so-called, in Mr. Mumler’s other prints, you’ll notice that Child’s attitude is contrived. He means, in his gory make-up, to be noticed. He means to unsettle while still being seen. Sir David Brewster’s Ghost,” he said. “Otherwise known as the lady in white. It has been a trick of our trade, Mr. Gerry, for as long as the camera has been there to make it.”
“May it please the court to know that the Commonwealth’s witness attests to the following: Mr. Mumler did not manufacture Child’s presence. Mr. Mumler employed it, to conscious deception.”
“As I said,” said Bogardus, “that is what I believe.”
“And when he could no longer, sir—when Child had degraded himself good and well—then that is when he came to you to master Mr. Mumler’s trick?”
“I suppose he had taken his fill,” said Bogardus, “of being Mr. Mumler’s boy. Sustenance is sustenance, but all of us must have our pride.”
“Did he admit that this was so? That he had tired of Mumler’s yoke?”
“Mr. Child did not need to admit it,” he said. “His disposition was transparent.”
“Let the record reflect that the witness, Bogardus, believes the defendant to be in cahoots with Algernon Child, who is under discussion. But back to those devious methods of Mumler’s. Of those you and Child recreated together, which one of the four do you think came out best?”
“The double exposure was bully,” he said. “I have it with me here, in fact.”
“Exhibit the Second,” said Counsellor, striding toward Dowling, a picture in hand, whose contents—thank heavens!—I never made out, inferior as they most certainly were. “May it please the court to know that the picture which Mr. Bogardus has shown not only boasts plainly of Algernon Child, who Mr. Mumler claims is dead, but that the state’s witness produced it with ease by following one of the nine stated methods.”
“Noted duly,” said the judge. “Am I to presume that the Commonwealth rests?”
“Mr. Bogardus, one very last question—and here I’ll ask you not to laugh. Have you ever had cause to ascribe to yourself or been ascribed by anyone such abilities or influences as tether themselves to those of ghost-seers and mediums, sir?”
“You mean, am I a Spiritualist?”
“I mean do you possess abilities?”
“Artistic abilities, certainly, sir. Would that I possessed those others. That way, I’d be able to say year to year what will show as the greatest advance in my field. As such I am always discoveries behind.”
“Defence objects,” said Townsend, meekly. “Clearly, the witness is being facetious. And might I go further in saying, My Lord, that Spiritualism itself is not—”
“—sustained,” said Dowling, gloomily. “Counsellor should limit his questions to cameras. If Mr. Bogardus is not a believer, it can be no concern of ours.”
“Of course, My Lord,” said Gerry, smiling.
But the damage, of course, had already been done.
Only later did Livermore—curse him and damn him!—enter the courtroom and climb toward the stand. He did it all with perfect poise, with his spine thrown back straight and his moustache aspirant. He seemed to be scanning the ground that he’d gained for trailing looks of admiration and I would be a liar, too, if I told you that mine was not.
The effect of the words he pronounced on the stand I shall recount for you in full. And not to impress their veracity on you, but rather to show you how needling they were, how venomous in retrospect, and I kept having wavering thoughts of the banker before I had known what a blackguard he was—when he’d stood in my Otis Street rooms, sad and wealthy, searching my face with his striking green eyes.
“Mr. Livermore, welcome,” said leading man Gerry.
And Livermore took down the front of his jacket.
Said Counsellor Gerry, “You knew the accused?”
“I do,” said Livermore.
“All three?”
“I had entered into business with one of them.”
“Which?”
He pointed. “That man, sitting there.”
“For the record,” said Gerry, “the witness means Mumler. William Mumler is the man with whom he entered into business. Mr. Livermore, tell me”—and Gerry walked wide, round the side of our table then back to his own—“for I have wondered why it was, your business being with this man, that you paid Mr. Mumler for services rendered then commended his name to the Boston police?”
“Mumler has a way, let’s say, of having that effect on people.”
“So that is why you gave him up? His methods seemed to you deceptive?”
“Deceptive, absolutely,” said Livermore, frowning. “And sir, I am a Spiritualist!”
“You of Webster’s Bank,” said Gerry, “believe in what this Mumler shows?”
“I believe in the foundations of it—that’s so. In Swedenborg. In Jackson Davis. In the midair contortions of Sir Henry Gordon.”
At this there were a couple of laughs.
“But I only believe in those things I can see. That is a compact I made with myself upon entering into this Spiritualism. Only stay, I told myself, if you have seen the proof yourself. I must admit, I have,” he said. “I have seen many wondrous things. Though it takes more than something just simply existing for me to admit it is widely conceivable.”
“And how to demonstrate that difference—between what happens and what is.”
This last was addressed half to Charles Livermore, and half to the bustling courtroom at large.
“The life of the mind is perception,” said Gerry. “The basis of your compact, sir! What is this unique, rarified characteristic you did not see in Mumler’s work?”
“Mr. Mumler had his habits. He did things while he took your picture. One of them was this,” he said, and drew a camera on the air. “He always slid the plate, just so, by way of his left hand enclosed in a glove.”
“Is that all?” said the counsellor.
“No, sir. There’s his closet. Never let a soul inside.”
“And this,” said Gerry, “I presume, is where he perfected the pictures he sold you?”
“I could not tell you at my word for I have never been inside.”
“That cannot be all,” said Gerry. “That will not be enough to damn him. What more besides convinced you, sir, that Mr. Mumler was a fraud?”
“There was also the length of the sessions.”
“How long?”
“Never less than one full hour.”
“Long enough, would you say, to take how many prints?”
“A goodly many, I should think. He would seem to be trying on different exposures like suits of stolen clothes,” he said. “And not only that, but the frequency of them.”
“The frequency?” said Counselor Gerry.
“He would have me return every week,” said the banker, “to make sure that he got it right.”
“Got what right? Elaborate.”
“A spirit picture of my wife.”
“Your wife …” Gerry glanced at his notes “… named Estelle, who died of consumption. Our sympathies, sir.”
“She was,” said Charlie Livermore, with a grief-stricken flash of those forest green eyes, “a young woman of thirty-five. Lucy Ellen, our daughter, is not here today—fortunate for her, no doubt.”
“And why is that?” said Counsellor Gerry.
“She would be in contempt of court.”
“I beg your pardon, sir,” said Gerry.
“She would never be able to countenance him, who has prospered so well from her dead mother’s name.”
And here he stabbed his chin at me—his sculpted, resilient, strong-principled chin, and all the courtroom gave a groan: three-quarters bereavement, one-quarter disgust.
“And he never did get her, did he?” said the Counsellor.
“Never quite,” the banker said. “Though told me he was drawing closer. And that, of course, would draw me back.”
“In the hope that one day he would get her?” said Gerry.
He paused. “I had no other choice.”
“A steep premium of a prospect, I’d think, to endure on the hope of one day seeing someone.”
“I see that only now,” he said. “I am ashamed to say it, sir.”
Those emeralds, faintly damp, turned up. Were there tears in a vial that he squirted into them?
I had to turn my eyes away while Gerry processed down the court. He muttered to himself en route. And then he said, “One. The consistency, sir, with which he used his leftmost hand. Two. The distrust that to all but himself he practised in his secret closet. Three. The extended lengths of time that saw him standing at the box. Four. The repeated appointments, at cost, that he all but insisted you make to his rooms. Why Mr. Livermore,” he said, with incredulous glory in his voice, “this might point to signs of suspicion, I grant you, but could it be the sordid truth?”
“On that,” said the banker, “I’ve no reservation.”
And here the degenerate thespian smiled. “Thank you, Mr. Livermore. Now let us speak of Mr. Child …”
And so the unhallowed proceedings continued—scurrilous lie after scurrilous lie.
They pissed their blame upon my grave. I hadn’t a thing to my name. I had time.
The Sadness blew hot and unclean through my sails.
When Townsend rose, a well-fed man with sprawling, ineffable under-eye bruises, I retained little hope of his tactics reversing the process that Gerry had preached into being. He untucked his glasses from over his ears and polished them at too great length.
He started: “Mr. Livermore, you are a Spiritualist, correct?”
“If you mean am I still one since last I confirmed it, I will venture to say that I am,” said the banker.
When the laughter that followed had died on the air, the Counsellor continued: “You might’ve fooled me.”
“And why is that?” said Livermore, behind a haughty half-formed smile.
“Because of what you’ve suffered, sir, at the hands of this man here before you,” he said. “Taking you up to the hub of your trust. And yet it appears that you have little trouble renewing the bonds of your faith in this court.”
“The Commonwealth objects,” said Gerry. “Objects resplendently, Your Honour. What bearing the witness’ faith can exert on the blamelessness of the accused is beyond me.”
“Sustained,” said Dowling. “Please rephrase.”
“Your Honour, if I may,” said Townsend, and started to polish his glasses again. “All that I mean corroborate, sir, is that through all of this you remain a disciple. Even when, notwithstanding the court’s knowledge of it, this is far from the first time you have been deceived.”
“You must be more specific, Counsellor.”
“I will be, sir,” and Townsend smiled, good-naturedly, his glasses polished. “Is the name R.S. Lillie familiar to you?”
“R.S., Counsellor?”
“Rachel Southey?”
“I seem to … yes … recall,” he said, “some person or other who went by that name.”
“I take it you are being wry. Could you forget her, really, sir?”
Livermore’s eyes went concertedly level. “Miss Lillie was a medium whom a number of years in the past I employed.”
“About how many years?”
“Some four or five.”
“Just after your wife—God protect her—had died?”
“I was in need of consolation.”
“Doubtless, sir, you were,” said Townsend. “Nor ever would I question that. But this Miss Lillie, sir, was different. Why was that, Mr. Livermore?”
“She had been surveying my daughter and me. She collected a file of misfortune on us. And then,” said the banker, unthinking, provoked, with the lather of something consuming upon him, “she extorted, why, hundreds of dollars from us on the basis that she could see into our hearts.”
“But she could not see in,” said Townsend, “is what you are implying, sir.”
“No more than I can see,” he said, “the object of what you are getting at, Counsellor.”
“Indeed,” said Judge Dowling. “Be forthcoming, Counsellor.”
“She could not see in,” said Townsend, “and yet you are a Spiritualist. You had been extorted, in other words, sir, by the order to which you now pledge your allegiance. If Our Lord Jesus Christ when he entered the temple had overturned half of the money he saw and pocketed what still remained, might all his disciples have followed him out with the same resolution of purpose, I wonder?”
“I reckon that they might, at that. It was not safe for them to stay.”
“A clever, considered rejoinder,” said Townsend. “For you are clever aren’t you, sir? Too clever, at that, to be taken in twice by so venal a species of liar as Mumler. The witness has a prejudice,” Townsend announced to the courtroom at large, “to put it very mildly, sirs. A prejudice, on second glance, that has all the marks of entrapment,” he said.
“Objection!” said Gerry.
“Sustained,” said Judge Dowling. “I’ll remind Counsellor Townsend the witness himself has never one moment been under suspicion.”
“True enough,” said Counsellor Townsend. “Allow me to rephrase.” He paused. “That unfortunate business you suffered with Lillie—how did it impress you, sir?”
“Impress?”
“How did it make you feel?”
“As any man might in the wake of such evil. Violated, sir, profoundly.”
“And angry?”
“Well naturally, sir,” said the banker.
“In extremis,” said Townsend, “and in the long term?”
“No longer,” said Charles Livermore, “than was needed. That woman, that Lillie, off-white as she was”—and here a breeze of laughter blew—“did not deserve the energy that it would’ve cost me to show her contempt. She was a fraud. A parasite. A creature well beneath regard,”—and here the breeze of laughter died as the banker began to show red in the face—“and she no more deserved my impassioned disdain than the right to recite my late wife’s blessed name.”
“And yet,” said Counsellor Townsend, mild, “you do seem very angry now.”
“The memory of it rankles me.”
“And all of us on your behalf. It is an unfortunate narrative, sir. Though I dare say had suchlike befallen my life—and I am glad it hasn’t, sir!— I should not only like to attend where it stings, but rectify it, tit for tat.”
“I’ve imagined it hundreds of times,” said the banker.
“Why stop with Lillie?” said the Counselor. “Why not against all Spiritualists who have preyed shamelessly on the stricken and weak?”
“You’re asking am I a crusader?” he said.
“A crusader,” said Townsend, “seems generous, sir.”
“Then what am I?” said Livermore.
“I think you are an inside man who courts an agenda of widespread entrapment. I think you are a shattered man who nurses—”
“I object!” said Gerry. “Counsellor Townsend is badgering, honour!”
“Sustained,” said Dowling less severely, as though he were rotating something in mind. The banker was a little whey-faced—not so pretty now, was he?
“I’m curious, Counsellor,” said the Judge when by and large the hubbub ceased, “of what might be the benefit behind such—as you have explained it—entrapment?”
“Mr. Livermore,” said Townsend, affixing the banker again in his sights, “explain to us in layman’s terms the concept of Roxbury Unity Lenders.”
The banker went more curdled still. “It is …”
“Your concept, is it not?”
“My concept, yes,” said Livermore. “A sort of, well—a public trust.”
“Publically advertised?”
“Publically owned.”
“Privately advertised, then.”
“Within reason.”
“And what would you say,” Townsend said, “is its function?”
“To furnish Boston’s citizens with a future they might not begin to afford.”
“Begin to afford?”
“An ungraspable future.”
“These are not layman’s terms,” said Townsend.
“An ungraspable future, at last, that can be. I sell mortgages, sir—I will sell them—to soldiers when they arrive home from the war,” said the banker.
“Beneath the auspices of Webster’s?” said Townsend.
“You might say a sideline of Webster’s,” he said.
“And so being a sideline and selling, well, something apart from the notion of mortgages, surely, how is it you finance your venture?” said Townsend. “This Roxbury Unity Lenders of yours?”
“I offer up securities.”
“You have others buy in, do you mean?”
“That is right.”
“So that Private Jack Johnson, let’s say,” said the Counsellor, “who purchases a home in Quincy, obtains said home by leave of you and how many other shareholding investors?”
“Only technically, really, by leave of myself, but if you wish to quibble …”
“No. I am less interested in how many than whom.”
“I could never reveal—”
“Oh you needn’t,” said Townsend. “For I have got their names right here. Or anyway some telling ones.”
Gerry rose spitting, “Objection, Your Honour!”
“Of course you object, Counsellor Gerry,” said Townsend. “For your name is among the lot.”
A deafening hubbub went up in the court, and Dowling brought his gavel down, and as he whacked it—once, twice, thrice—he said: “You may proceed, I’m sure!”
“I thank Your Honour for his grace.” Townsend took down his glasses, wiped at them, replaced them. “I said that I had Gerry’s name on this list of investors I hold in my hand. Though that is not quite true, I fear. For the name I have here is not Gerry but Griswold—Cornelius Griswold, to be quite specific—who turn and turn about, I’ve learned, is none other than Gerry’s own brother-in-law. Which development might be coincidence, purely, were it not for a bevy of others just like it. Can you guess what they are, Mr. Livermore, sir?”
“I’d rather you delight me, Counsellor.”
“Ferdinand Tallmadge, the cousin-by-marriage of one Marshall Tooker who brought in this case. Benjamin Seybert, the nephew,” he said, “of one of your witnesses, Asahel Baker. Samuel Browning, the god-son, I think, of no one less than P.T. Barnum, who if I’m not mistaken has been instrumental in bringing this poor man before you to heel. And would you like me to go on?”
“I’ve suffered enough of your humbug,” he said.
“It appears that His Judgeship alone,” said the Counsellor, “is missing some relative’s name from this list. The reason? By proxy and secret design, with nothing forthcoming to link them by name, these men have straw-purchased a paying interest in a confidence scheme of titanic proportions. Participate in Mumler’s downfall, profit from a civil war!”
Said Livermore, “Don’t be absurd, man—”
“Objection—”
“Order! Order! Order! Ord—”
I volunteered nothing, smiled slightly, perhaps.
When I rose from my bench for the day to be coffled and led through the court to my cell in the jail, I got a glimpse of all the faces milling back beyond the rail. A gallery of rogues, all right—a frieze of faces I had known yet that I seemed to know no longer. Mr. Wilson the tailor, the actor J. Jefferson, Mr. Isaac Babbit of Babbit’s Brand Metals, “Mutton Chops” Murray, Reverend Spear, LaRoy and Lucretia Sunderland.
At first I felt only a sort of exposure, rawness to the weather of them, but as I watched them watching me, the milling, rapt ranks of my quote-on-quote victims, I started to feel something else, something finer, the manifest pull of their sundry attentions, and I couldn’t help it, dear reader, I beamed.
And I thought to myself: They have come here for me!
They have come here, my patrons, to judge for themselves.