excitements.

The case of "The People _vs._ Stephen Coburn" had been an intensely
popular entertainment. This day the room was unusually stuffed with men
and women. At the door the officers leaned like buttresses against the
thrust of a solid wall of humanity. Outside, the halls, the stairs, and
the sidewalk were jammed with the mob crushing toward the door for a
sight of the white-haired mother pilloried in the witness-box and
fighting with all her poor wits against the shrewdest, calmest, fiercest
cross-examiner in the State.

In the jury-box the twelve silent prisoners of patience sat in awe of
their responsibilities, a dozen extraordinarily ordinary, conspicuously
average persons condemned to the agony of deciding whether they should
consign a fellow-man to death or release a murderer among their
fellow-men.

Next the judge sat Sarah Coburn, her withered hands clenched bonily in
the lap where, not so many years ago, she had cuddled the babe that was
now the culprit hunted down and abhorred. The mere pressure of his first
finger had sent a soul into eternity and brought the temple of his own
home crashing about his head.

Next the prisoner sat his father, veteran now with the experience that
runs back to the time when the first father and mother found the first
first-born of the world with hands reddened in the blood of the earliest
sacrifice on the altar of Cain.

People railed in the street and in the press against the law's delay
with Stephen Coburn's execution and against the ability of a rich father
to postpone indefinitely the vengeance of justice. Old Coburn had forced
the taxpayers to spend vast sums of money. He had spent vaster sums
himself. The public and the prosecution, his own enormously expensive
lawyers, his son and his very wife, supposed that he still had vast sums
to spend. It was solely his own secret that he had no more. He had built
his fortune as his father had built the stone wall along his fields,
digging each boulder from the ground with his hands, lugging it across
the irregular turf and heaving it to its place. Every dollar of his had
its history of effort, of sweat and ache. And now the whole wall was
gone, carried away in wholesale sweeps as by a landslide.

In his business he had been so shrewd and so close that people had said,
"Old Coburn will fight for five days for five minute's interest on five
cents." When his son's liberty was at stake he signed blank checks, he
told his