s decisions, when by a libel suit the Judge had broken up
his business and kept him in jail eighteen months. Public sentiment was
on Kane's side, and he had an ovation on his release, when he became
city editor of the _Journal_.

There was disappointment that I had not criticised Judge Grier's course
in the first number of the _Visiter_, but this was part of my plan. In
the second number I stated that there had been for a long time a great
legal luminary visible in the Pennsylvania heavens, which had suddenly
disappeared. I had been searching for him for several weeks with the
best telescopes in the city, and had about given him up as a lost star,
when I bethought me of Paddy, who had heated his gun-barrel and bent it
around a tree so that he might be able to shoot around corners. Paddy's
idea was so excellent that I had adopted it and made a crooked
telescope, by which I had found that luminary almost sixty degrees below
our moral horizon. From this I proceeded to the merits of the case.

Judge Grier and Dr. Mitchell were both elders in the Presbyterian
church. The Judge administered to men the eucharist oath to follow
Christ, then usurped the law-making power of the United States to punish
them for obeying one of the plainest precepts of the Master.

The article seemed to throw him into a furious passion. He threatened to
sue Mr. Riddle for having the _Visiter_ printed and sold in his office,
and, as for me, I was to suffer all the pains and penalties which law
and public scorn could inflict. He demanded a satisfactory retraction
and apology as the least atonement he could accept for the insult. These
Mr. Riddle promised in my name, and I did not hesitate to make the
promise good.

My next article was headed "An Apology," and in it I stated the
circumstances which had called it out, and the pleasant prospect of my
being sent to Mount Airy (our county jail) in case this, my apology, was
not satisfactory. I should of course do my best to satisfy his honor,
but in case of failure, should take comfort in the fact that the Mount
would make a good observatory. From that height I should be able to use
my telescope much better than in my present valley of humiliation.
Indeed, the mere prospect had so improved my glass, that I had caught a
new view of our sunken star, and to-day, this dispenser of justice, this
gentleman with the high sense of honor, was a criminal under sentence of
death by the divine law. "He who stealeth