r acuteness even than your father, the
Chief Justice, for he used to understand me _after I had done_, but your
lordship understands me even _before I have begun_."

Of Whigham, a later leader on the Northern Circuit, an amusing story
used to be told. He was defending a prisoner, and opened an alibi in his
address to the jury, undertaking to prove it by calling the person who
had been in bed with his client at the time in question, and deprecating
their evil opinion of a woman whose moral character was clearly open to
grave reproach, but who was still entitled to be believed upon her oath.
Then he called "Jessie Crabtree." The name was, as usual, repeated by
the crier, and there came pushing his way sturdily through the crowd a
big Lancashire lad in his rough dress, who had been the prisoner's
veritable bedfellow--Whigham's brief not having explained to him that
the Christian name of his witness was, in this case, a male one.

Colman, in his _Random Records_, tells the following anecdote of the
witty barrister, Mr. Jekyll. One day observing a squirrel in Colman's
chambers, in the usual round cage, performing the same operation as a
man in a tread-mill, and looking at it for a minute, exclaimed, "Oh!
poor devil, he's going the Home Circuit."

Jekyll was asked why he no longer spoke to a lawyer named Peat; to which
he replied, "I choose to give up his acquaintance--I have common of
turbary, and have a right to cut _peat_!" An impromptu of his on a
learned serjeant who was holding the Court of Common Pleas with his
glittering eye, is well known:

"Behold the serjeant full of fire,
Long shall his hearers rue it,
His purple garments _came_ from Tyre,
His arguments _go to it_."

Mr. H. L. Adam, in his volume _The Story of Crime_, tells an amusing
story of a prisoner whose counsel had successfully obtained his
acquittal on a charge of brutal assault. A policeman came across a man
one night lying unconscious on the pavement, and near by him was an
ordinary "bowler" hat. That was the only clue to the perpetrator of the
deed. The police had their suspicions of a certain individual, whom they
proceeded to interrogate. In addition to being unable to give a
satisfactory account of his movements on the night of the assault, it
was found that the "bowler" hat in question fitted him like a glove. He
was accordingly arrested and charged with the crime, the hat being the
chief evidence against him. Counsel for t