lance, with the sum of its possibilities, the augurs
all sincere, confident, and exulting. They have been justified so often;
they know, in their wide fair fields of opportunity, just what qualities
will produce what results. There is thus a complacence among adolescent
peoples which is vaguely irritating to their elders; but the greybeards
need not be over-captious; it is only a question of time, pathetically
short-lived in the history of the race. Sanguine persons in Elgin were
freely disposed to "bet on" Lorne Murchison, and there were none
so despondent as to take the view that he would not come out of it,
somehow; with an added personal significance. To make a spoon is a
laudable achievement, but it may be no mean business to spoil a horn.

As the Express put it, there was as little standing room for ladies and
gentlemen in the courthouse the first day of the Spring Assizes as there
was for horses in the Court House Square. The County Crown Attorney
was unusually, oddly, reinforced by Cruickshank, of Toronto--the great
Cruickshank, K.C., probably the most distinguished criminal lawyer in
the Province. There were those who considered that Cruickshank should
not have been brought down, that it argued undue influence on the
part of the bank, and his retainer was a fierce fan to the feeling in
Moneida; but there is no doubt that his appearance added all that was
possible to the universal interest in the case. Henry Cruickshank was an
able man and, what was rarer a fastidious politician. He had held office
in the Dominion Cabinet, and had resigned it because of a difference
with his colleagues in the application of a principle; they called him,
after a British politician of lofty but abortive views, the Canadian
Renfaire. He had that independence of personality, that intellectual
candour, and that touch of magnetism which combine to make a man
interesting in his public relations. Cruickshank's name alone would have
filled the courthouse, and people would have gone away quoting him.

From the first word of the case for the prosecution there was that in
the leading counsel's manner--a gravity, a kindness, an inclination to
neglect the commoner methods of scoring--that suggested, with the sudden
chill of unexpectedly bad news, a foregone conclusion. The reality of
his feeling reference to the painful position of the defendant's father,
the sincerity of his regret on behalf of the bank, for the deplorable
exigency under whi