y
of the nurse Temple. The paper containing the curse was as indisputably
in the handwriting of Mr. Napier as was the funeral letter. The money
paid was proved by the fact that the orphan had been kept and educated
for fifteen years. The name Henrietta was not likely to have been a mere
coincidence, and it was still more unlikely that a respectable woman
such as Mrs. Hislop would invent a story of affiliation so strangely in
harmony with the secrets of the house in Meggat's Land, and fortify it
by a forged document. Then Mrs. Hislop was unable to write, and no
attempt had been made on the other side to prove that Henrietta had a
father other than he who was pointed out by the paper of the curse. So
he (the counsel) might follow the example of his brother, and hold the
other half of the case to be unexplainable by hypotheses, however
ridiculous. The child having been disposed of to Mrs. Hislop,--a fact
thus proved,--what was to prevent him (the counsel) from going also to
the haunts of the _tabernian_ Solons, or anywhere else in the regions of
fancy, for the theory that Mr. Napier, or some plotter for him in the
shape of Mrs. Kemp or John Cowie, substituted the dead child of a
stranger for the living one of his wife, and bribed the nurse Temple to
tell the tale she had told? to which she would be the more ready by the
golden promptings of the woman Isabel Napier, the niece, whose brother
would, in the event of the stratagem being concealed, succeed to the
estate of Eastleys.

At the conclusion of these pleadings, the judges were inclined to be
even more humorous than they had been previous to the issuing of the
commission, for they had thought they saw their way to a judgment
against the orphan. The president (Braxfield), it is said, indulged in a
joke, to the effect that he had read _somewhere_--it was not for so
religious a man to say where--of a child having been claimed by two
mothers; he would like to see two fathers at that work, at least he
would not be one; but here the claim was set up by Death on the one
side, and Life (if a personification could be allowed) on the other, and
they could not follow the old precedent, because he suspected none of
their lordships would like to see the grim claimant at the bar to
receive his half. And so they chuckled, as judges sometimes do, at their
own jokes--generally very bad--altogether oblivious of the fable of the
frogs who could see no fun in a game which was death to them