It is interesting to compare this account with one which is the best example of Boake's meditated prose style. Nearly four years later, and some six weeks before his death, he paid a visit to Darlinghurst Gaol, Sydney, and subsequently penned the following sketch, left among his papers, and published in The Bulletin of 28th May, 1892, a few days after his body had been found hanging to a tree on the shore of Middle Harbour.
A BAD QUARTER OF AN HOUR.
I stood on the gallows the other day and read—neatly painted on a beam—the names of those men whom a well-meaning Government has thence helped on their way to the happy hunting grounds. Unfortunately it was daylight at the time of my visit; otherwise I am convinced that I should have been vouchsafed an opportunity of comparing notes with one or more of those gentlemen who, like myself, have enjoyed the advantages of a short shrift and a long rope. .
I have had what the author of ‘Our Mutual Friend’ calls ‘a turn-up with death’ at various periods of a somewhat chequered existence; but never was the contest so prolonged, or the result so doubtful, as on the following occasion. .
Never mind the why, when, or how of the matter: let it suffice that the noose tightened around my throat and severed my connection with the outer world. I no longer possessed a body: nothing was left of me but my head; and that reposed in the centre of a vast cycloramic enclosure whose walls, inscribed with the names and signs of the various arts and sciences, spun round with a waving, snakelike motion that made my eyes throb with a violent pain—nor could I turn them away, hypnotised as I was by the giddy horror of that resistless velocity. .
