med to him the
clearest sort of a case. When it was all over, and the defendant had
passed out of the courtroom rejoicing, he turned to the foreman and
asked the reason for the verdict.

"Did you hear your chief witness say he was a carpenter?" inquired the
foreman.

"Why, certainly," answered the district attorney,

"Did you hear me ask him what he paid for that ready-made pine door he
claimed to be working on when he saw the assault?"

The prosecutor recalled the incident and nodded.

"Well, he said ten dollars--and I knew he was a liar. A door like that
don't cost but four-fifty!"

It is, perhaps, too much to require a knowledge of carpentry on the part
of a lawyer trying an assault case. Yet the juror was undoubtedly right
in his deduction.

In a case where insanity is the defence, the State must dig up and have
at hand every person it can find who knew the accused at any period of
his career. He will probably claim that in his youth he was kicked in
a game of foot-ball and fractured his skull, that later he fell into an
elevator shaft and had concussion of the brain, or that he was hit on
the head by a burglar. It is usually difficult, if not impossible, to
disprove such assertions, but the prosecutor must be ready, if he can,
to show that foot-ball was not invented until after the defendant had
attained maturity, that it was some other man who fell down the elevator
shaft, and to produce the burglar to deny that the assault occurred.
Naturally, complete preparation for an important trial demands the
presence of many witnesses who ultimately are not needed and who are
never called. Probably in most such cases about half the witnesses
do not testify at all. Most of what has been said relates to the
preparation for trial of cases where the accused is already under arrest
when the district attorney is called into the case. If this stage has
not been reached the prosecutor may well be called upon to exercise some
of the functions of a detective in the first instance.

A few years ago it was brought to the attention of the New York
authorities that many blackmailing letters were being received bearing
the name of "Lewis Jarvis." These were of a character to render the
apprehension of the writer of them a matter of much importance. The
letters directed that the replies be sent to a certain box in the New
York post-office, but as the boxes are numerous and close together it
seemed doubtful if "Lewis Jarvis" coul