ded from deduction to deduction before drawing his
conclusions, and reconstructed the past career of a conscience as Cuvier
reconstructed an Anoplotherium. When considering a brief he would often
wake in the night, startled by a gleam of truth suddenly sparkling
in his brain. Struck by the deep injustice, which is the end of these
contests, in which everything is against the honest man, everything
to the advantage of the rogue, he often summed up in favor of equity
against law in such cases as bore on questions of what may be termed
divination. Hence he was regarded by his colleagues as a man not of
a practical mind; his arguments on two lines of deduction made their
deliberations lengthy. When Popinot observed their dislike to listening
to him he gave his opinion briefly; it was said that he was not a good
judge in this class of cases; but as his gift of discrimination was
remarkable, his opinion lucid, and his penetration profound, he was
considered to have a special aptitude for the laborious duties of an
examining judge. So an examining judge he remained during the greater
part of his legal career.

Although his qualifications made him eminently fitted for its difficult
functions, and he had the reputation of being so learned in criminal
law that his duty was a pleasure to him, the kindness of his heart
constantly kept him in torture, and he was nipped as in a vise between
his conscience and his pity. The services of an examining judge are
better paid than those of a judge in civil actions, but they do not
therefore prove a temptation; they are too onerous. Popinot, a man of
modest and virtuous learning, without ambition, an indefatigable
worker, never complained of his fate; he sacrificed his tastes and
his compassionate soul to the public good, and allowed himself to be
transported to the noisome pools of criminal examinations, where he
showed himself alike severe and beneficent. His clerk sometimes would
give the accused some money to buy tobacco, or a warm winter garment,
as he led him back from the judge's office to the Souriciere, the
mouse-trap--the House of Detention where the accused are kept under the
orders of the Examining Judge. He knew how to be an inflexible judge
and a charitable man. And no one extracted a confession so easily as
he without having recourse to judicial trickery. He had, too, all the
acumen of an observer. This man, apparently so foolishly good-natured,
simple, and absent-minded, coul