?"--"No."--"Have you a child?" Here there was a long pause, and
then at last the witness feebly replied, "Yes." Sumner sat down with an
air of triumph. Rufus Choate was advocate for the husband, who claimed
the divorce, and after enlarging on other things, said, "Gentlemen,
Abigail Bell's evidence is before you." Raising himself proudly, he
continued, "I solemnly assert there is not the shadow of a shade of
doubt or suspicion on that evidence or on her character." Everybody
looked surprised, and he went on: "What though in an unguarded moment
she may have trusted too much to the young man to whom she had pledged
her untried affections; to whom she was to be wedded on the next Lord's
Day; and who was suddenly struck dead at her feet by a stroke of
lightning out of the heavens!" This was delivered with such tragic
effect that Choate, majestically pausing, saw the jury had taken the
cue, and he went on triumphantly to the end. He afterwards told his
friends that he had a right to make any supposition consistent with the
witness's innocence.

A client went to consult him as to the proper redress for an intolerable
insult and wrong he had just suffered. He had been in a dispute with a
waiter at the hotel, who in a paroxysm of rage and contempt told the
client "to go to ----." "Now," said the client, "I ask you, Mr. Choate,
as one learned in the law, and as my legal adviser, what course under
these circumstances I ought to take to punish this outrageous insult."
Choate looked grave, and told the client to repeat slowly all the
incidents preceding this outburst, telling him to be careful not to omit
anything, and when this was done Choate stood for a while as if in deep
thought and revolving an abstruse subject; he then gravely said: "I have
been running over in my head all the statutes of the United States, and
all the statutes of the commonwealth of Massachusetts, and all the
decisions of all the judges in our Courts therein, and I may say that I
am thoroughly satisfied that there is nothing in any of them that will
require you to go to the place you have mentioned. And if you will take
my advice then I say decidedly--_don't go_."

Choate defended a blacksmith whose creditor had seized some iron that a
friend had lent him to assist in the business after a bankruptcy. The
seizure of the iron was said to have been made harshly. Choate thus
described it: "He arrested the arm of industry as it fell towards the
anvil; he put out