plication that they had given interment to a valet, and who were
determined to resist exhumation at all hazards. The supers in the drama,
whose business it was to whisper to each other and to the players,
consisted of solicitors, solicitors' clerks, and experts; their combined
emoluments worked out at the rate of a hundred and fifty pounds a day.
Twelve excellent men in the jury-box received between them about as much
as would have kept a K.C. alive for five minutes. The total expenses of
production thus amounted to something like six or seven hundred pounds a
day. The preliminary expenses had run into several thousands. The
enterprise could have been made remunerative by hiring for it Convent
Garden Theatre and selling stalls as for Tettrazzini and Caruso, but in
the absurd auditorium chosen, crammed though it was to the perilous
doors, the loss was necessarily terrific. Fortunately the affair was
subsidized; not merely by the State, but also by those two wealthy
capitalists, Whitney C. Witt and Mr. Oxford; and therefore the
management were in a position to ignore paltry financial considerations
and to practise art for art's sake.

In opening the case Mr. Pennington, K.C., gave instant proof of his
astounding histrionic powers. He began calmly, colloquially, treating
the jury as friends of his boyhood, and the judge as a gifted uncle, and
stated in simple language that Whitney C. Witt was claiming seventy-two
thousand pounds from the defendants, money paid for worthless pictures
palmed off upon the myopic and venerable plaintiff as masterpieces. He
recounted the life and death of the great painter Priam Farll, and his
solemn burial and the tears of the whole world. He dwelt upon the genius
of Priam Farll, and then upon the confiding nature of the plaintiff.
Then he inquired who could blame the plaintiff for his confidence in the
uprightness of a firm with such a name as Parfitts. And then he
explained by what accident of a dating-stamp on a canvas it had been
discovered that the pictures guaranteed to be by Priam Farll were
painted after Priam Farll's death.

He proceeded with no variation of tone: "The explanation is simplicity
itself. Priam Farll was not really dead. It was his valet who died.
Quite naturally, quite comprehensibly, the great genius Priam Farll
wished to pass the remainder of his career as a humble valet. He
deceived everybody; the doctor, his cousin, Mr. Duncan Farll, the public
authorities, the Dea