se before to-day?"

Joe thought a bit.

"Be careful, sir, I warn you," says Ricochet.

"Yes," said Joe; "I have."

"I thought so. When? To whom?"

And here an air of triumph lit up the features of Mr. Ricochet.

"Afore I comed here."

"When! let's have it?"

"Outside the Court."

"To Bumpkin?"

"No; to that there Locust; he axed un--"

"Never mind what he axed you;" said Ricochet, whose idea of humour
consisted in the repetition of an illiterate observation; and he sat
down--as well he might--after such an exhibition of the art of advocacy.

But on re-examination, it turned out that Mr. Locust had put several
questions to Joe with a view of securing his evidence himself at a
reasonable remuneration, and of contradicting Mr. Bumpkin.

This caused the jury to look at one another with grave faces and shake
their heads.

Mr. Ricochet began and continued his speech in the same common-place
style as his cross-examination; abusing everyone on the other side,
especially that respectable solicitor, Mr. Prigg; and endeavouring to
undo his own bad performance with the witness by a worse speech to the
jury. What he was going to show, and what he was going to prove, was
wonderful; everybody who had been called was guilty of perjury; everybody
he was going to call would be a paragon of all the virtues. He
expatiated upon the great common sense of the jury (as though they were
fools), relied on their sound judgment and denounced the conduct of Mr.
Bumpkin in the witness-box as a piece of artful acting, intended to
appeal to the weakness of the jury. But all was useless. Snooks made a
sorry figure in the box. He was too emphatic, too positive, too abusive.
Mr. Ricochet could not get over his own cross-examination. The
ridiculous counterclaim with its pettifogging innuendoes vanished before
that common sense of the jury to which Mr. Ricochet so dryly appealed.
The edifice erected by the modern pleader's subtle craftiness was
unsubstantial as the icy patterns on the window-pane, which a single
breath can dissipate. And yet these ingenious contrivances were
sufficient to give an unimportant case an appearance of substantiality
which it otherwise would not have possessed.

The jury, after a most elaborate charge from Mr. Justice Pangloss, who
went through the cases of the last 900 years in the most careful manner,
returned a verdict for the plaintiff with twenty-five pounds damages.
The learned Judge did not gi