s the witness,
"have--you--not--told--them--that--this case was nothing to do with you
as your name wasn't Bumpkin?"

"My lord," says the witness.

"No, no; you must answer."

The witness stood confounded.

"You decline to answer," says the counsel. "Very well; now then, let me
see if you will decline to answer this. When you were robbed, as you
say, was anybody with you?"

"Be I obligated to answer, my lord?"

"I think you must answer," said his lordship.

"There wur."

"Who was it?"

"A companion, I s'poase."

"Yes, but who was he? what was his name?"

No answer.

"You'd rather not answer; very well. Where does he live?"

"I doant know. Westmunster, I believe."

"Is he here?"

"Not as I knows on."

("What a lark this is," chuckled the Don, as he sat in the corner of the
gallery peeping from behind the front row.)

"Did he see the watch taken?"

"He did, leastways I s'poase so."

"And has never appeared as a witness?"

"How is that?" asks his lordship.

"He axed me, m'lud, not to say as 'ow he wur in it."

Judge shakes his head. Counsel for the prisoner shakes his head at the
jury, and the jury shake their heads at one another.

Now in the front row of the gallery sat five young men in the undress
uniform of the hussars: they were Joe and his brother recruits come to
hear the famous trial. At this moment Mr. Bumpkin in sheer despair
lifted his eyes in the direction of the gallery and immediately caught
sight of his old servant. He gave a nod of recognition as if he were the
only friend left in the wide world of that Court of Justice.

"Never mind your friends in the gallery," said Mr. Nimble; "I dare say
you have plenty of them about; now attend to this question:"--Yes, and a
nice question it was, considering the tone and manner with which it was
asked. "At the moment when you were being robbed, as you say, did a
young woman with a baby in her arms come up?"

The witness's attention was again distracted, but this time by no such
pleasing object as on the former occasion. He was dumbfoundered; a
sparrow facing an owl could hardly be in a greater state of nervousness
and discomfiture: for down in the well of the Court, a place where he had
never once cast his eyes till now, with a broad grin on his coarse
features, and a look of malignant triumph, sat the _fiendlike Snooks_!
His mouth was wide open, and Bumpkin found himself looking down into it
as though it had been a saw-pit.