of the country to the other, while in Mynyddshire and in
the county town itself the excitement was so great that not the
smallest attention was bestowed on any other case that was to come
before the courts.

Even the judges themselves were infected with the excitement all
around them. Mr. Justice Buller had read the depositions taken before
the magistrates prior to leaving town. He had discussed little else
with his brother Wiseman in the train. In all their experience, they
agreed, they had never met with a case so clear upon the evidence, and
yet so unsatisfactory to the mind.

In the presence of the sheriff, of course, the subject was dropped.
Nor could it be resumed after dinner. Later on the judge of the
criminal court sat down to make notes for his charge to the grand jury
on the morrow. In this he dealt with several other serious cases that
appeared in the calendar. But his gravest attention was devoted to the
one that dwarfed all the others. This disposed of, he soon retired to
rest.

The formal business of opening the assizes had been gone through on
the afternoon the judges arrived. Sir Daniel Buller had been trumpeted
off to the Court-house, and had sat with as much patience as he could
command--and that was not a great deal--while a rather short-sighted
and very fidgety clerk of arraigns, afflicted, moreover, with a severe
cough, stumbled his way through the important documents already
described. This proceeding was necessary in order to inform the loyal
inhabitants of Mynyddshire, chiefly represented by errand-boys and
loafers from the neighbouring taps, who their red-robed visitors
really were, and what they had come to do.

On the following morning, therefore, the judges were free to proceed
to work. They drove down to the court at half-past ten, accompanied
by the swelling Reynolds and the visibly crestfallen chaplain, and
escorted by the inevitable javelin-men, who swarmed about the place
all day under the pretext of keeping order.

Sir John Wiseman went quietly off to his own court, and began at once
at the unexciting work of trying whether the drippings from a
wholesale piano warehouseman's spout had or had not damaged the hats
in a neighbouring hat store, and, if so, whether the wholesale piano
warehouseman was to blame, and if to blame, how much he ought to pay
to the aggrieved hatter. Two of the gentlemen so unfairly deprived of
seats upon the bench were engaged in this important case, and it