age with handcuffs on his wrists, with forced
conversation when any, he returned between his captors to Victoria to
be tried for murder at the High Court of Bow.

At the trial he was defended by a young barrister of considerable
ability who had gone into the Cabinet in order to enhance his forensic
reputation. And he was ably defended. It is no exaggeration to say
that the speech for the defence showed it to be usual, even natural
and right, to give a dinner to twenty men and to slip away without
ever saying a word, leaving all, with the waiters, dead. That was the
impression left in the minds of the jury. And Mr. Watkyn-Jones felt
himself practically free, with all the advantages of his awful
experience, and his two jokes intact. But lawyers are still
experimenting with the new act which allows a prisoner to give
evidence. They do not like to make no use of it for fear they may be
thought not to know of the act, and a lawyer who is not in touch with
the very latest laws is soon regarded as not being up to date and he
may drop as much as L50,000 a year in fees. And therefore though
it always hangs their clients they hardly like to neglect it.

Mr. Watkyn-Jones was put in the witness box. There he told the simple
truth, and a very poor affair it seemed after the impassioned and
beautiful things that were uttered by the counsel for the defence. Men
and women had wept when they heard that. They did not weep when they
heard Watkyn-Jones. Some tittered. It no longer seemed a right and
natural thing to leave one's guests all dead and to fly the country.
Where was Justice, they asked, if anyone could do that? And when his
story was told the judge rather happily asked if he could make him die
of laughter too. And what was the joke? For in so grave a place as a
Court of Justice no fatal effects need be feared. And hesitatingly the
prisoner pulled from his pocket the three slips of paper: and
perceived for the first time that the one on which the first and best
joke had been written had become quite blank. Yet he could remember
it, and only too clearly. And he told it from memory to the Court.

"An Irishman once on being asked by his master to buy a morning paper
said in his usual witty way, 'Arrah and begorrah and I will be after
wishing you the top of the morning.'"

No joke sounds quite so good the second time it is told, it seems to
lose something of its essence, but Watkyn-Jones was not prepared for
the awful stillness w