ng. Fat bailiffs and court officers, concerned only in holding
their workless jobs, did not add anything to the spirit of the scene.
Two of them in the particular court in which this trial was held
contended hourly as to which should hand the judge a glass of water. One
preceded his honor like a fat, stuffy, dusty majordomo to and from his
dressing-room. His business was to call loudly, when the latter entered,
"His honor the Court, hats off. Everybody please rise," while a second
bailiff, standing at the left of his honor when he was seated, and
between the jury-box and the witness-chair, recited in an absolutely
unintelligible way that beautiful and dignified statement of collective
society's obligation to the constituent units, which begins, "Hear ye!
hear ye! hear ye!" and ends, "All those of you having just cause for
complaint draw near and ye shall be heard." However, you would have
thought it was of no import here. Custom and indifference had allowed it
to sink to a mumble. A third bailiff guarded the door of the jury-room;
and in addition to these there were present a court clerk--small,
pale, candle-waxy, with colorless milk-and-water eyes, and thin,
pork-fat-colored hair and beard, who looked for all the world like
an Americanized and decidedly decrepit Chinese mandarin--and a court
stenographer.

Judge Wilbur Payderson, a lean herring of a man, who had sat in this
case originally as the examining judge when Cowperwood had been indicted
by the grand jury, and who had bound him over for trial at this term,
was a peculiarly interesting type of judge, as judges go. He was so
meager and thin-blooded that he was arresting for those qualities alone.
Technically, he was learned in the law; actually, so far as life was
concerned, absolutely unconscious of that subtle chemistry of things
that transcends all written law and makes for the spirit and, beyond
that, the inutility of all law, as all wise judges know. You could have
looked at his lean, pedantic body, his frizzled gray hair, his fishy,
blue-gray eyes, without any depth of speculation in them, and his
nicely modeled but unimportant face, and told him that he was without
imagination; but he would not have believed you--would have fined
you for contempt of court. By the careful garnering of all his little
opportunities, the furbishing up of every meager advantage; by listening
slavishly to the voice of party, and following as nearly as he could the
behests of int