een brought to judgment and the convicted
criminal was in jail. But Sir John still persevered, and to this
perseverance he had been instigated very much by a certain clerk in the
post-office.

Two post-office clerks had been used as witnesses at the trial, of whom
the elder, Mr. Curlydown, had been by no means a constant or an
energetic witness. A witness, when he is brought up for the defence,
should not be too scrupulous, or he will be worse than useless. In a
matter of fact a man can only say what he saw, or tell what he heard, or
declare what he knew. He should at least do no more. Though it be to
save his father, he should not commit perjury. But when it comes to
opinion, if a man allows himself to waver, he will be taken as thinking
the very opposite of what he does think. Such had been the case with Mr.
Curlydown. He had intended to be very correct. He had believed that the
impression of the Sydney stamp was on the whole adverse to the idea that
it had been obtained in the proper way; and yet he had, when
cross-examined, acknowledged that it might very probably have been
obtained in the proper way. It certainly had not been 'smudged' at all,
and such impressions generally did become 'smudged.' But then he was
made to say also that impressions very often did not become smudged. And
as to the word 'Nobble' which should have been stamped upon the
envelope, he thought that in such a case its absence was very
suspicious; but still he was brought to acknowledge that post-masters in
provincial offices far away from inspection, frequently omit that part
of their duty. All this had tended to rob the envelope of those
attributes of deceit and conspiracy which Sir John Joram attributed to
it, and had justified the judge in his opinion that Mr. Curlydown's
evidence had told them little or nothing. But even Mr. Curlydown had
found more favour with the judge than Samuel Bagwax, the junior of the
two post-office witnesses. Samuel Bagwax had perhaps been a little too
energetic. He had made the case his own, and was quite sure that the
envelope had been tampered with. I think that the counsel for the Crown
pressed his witness unfairly when he asked Mr. Bagwax whether he was
absolutely certain that an envelope with such an impression could not
have passed through the post-office in the ordinary course of business.
'Nothing is impossible,' Mr. Bagwax had replied. 'Is it not very much
within the sphere of possibility?' the learned g