juryman to be, would ever have allowed him in the box. But
when other chaps on the panel presented their excuses to the judge and
managed to persuade him of the imperative needs of family or business,
and slipped--grinning discreetly--out of the court room, he merely
inaudibly called them welshers and pikers. No, he regarded jury service
as a duty and a privilege, one not to be lightly avoided--the one common
garden governmental function in which Uncle Sam expected every citizen
to do his duty.

"I won't let any of the rogues get by me!" he shouted gaily to his wife
over the back of the motor. "And anyhow I shan't be locked up all night.
There aren't any murder cases on the calendar. I'll be out on the
five-fifteen as usual."

Alas, poor Bently! Alas for human frailty and all those splendid
visions in which he pictured himself as the anchor of the ship of
justice, a prop and stay of the structure of democracy.

His train was a trifle late and the roll of the jury had already been
called, and the perennial excuses heard, when he entered the court room;
but the clerk, who knew him, nodded in a welcoming manner, checked him
off as present and dropped his name card in the revolving wheel. It was
a well-known scene to Bently, a veteran of fifteen years' service. Even
the actors were familiar friends--the pink-faced judge with his
snow-white whiskers, who at times suggested to Bently an octogenarian
angel, and, at others, a certain ancient baboon once observed in the
Primates cage at the Bronz Zoo; the harried, anxious little clerk with
his paradoxically grandiloquent intonation; the comedy assistant
district attorney with his wheezy voice emanating from a Falstaffian
body, who suffered from a soporific malady and was accustomed to open a
case and then let it take care of itself while he slumbered audibly
beneath the dais; even Ephraim Tutt, the gaunt, benignly
whimsical-looking attorney, in his rusty-black frock coat and
loose-hanging tie; his rotund partner, whose birdlike briskness and fat
paunch inevitably brought to mind a distended robin in specs; and the
_degage_ Bonnie Doon in his cut-in-at-the-waist checked suit--he knew
them all of old.

"Well, call your first case, Mister District Attorney!" directed the
judge, nodding encouragingly at Bently, well knowing that in him he had
a staunch upholder of the law-as-it-is, who could be depended upon to
bolster up his weaker or more sentimental brother talesmen into the