ay morning, had seen the Grinder with his companion in the cart
on the road leading towards Pycroft Common. A big burly barrister,
with a broad forehead and grey eyes, was questioning this witness as
to the identity of the men in the cart; and at every answer that he
received he turned round to the jury as though he would say "There,
then, what do you think of the case now, when such a man as that is
brought before you to give evidence?" "You will swear, then, that
these two men who are here in the dock were the two men you saw that
morning in that cart?" The witness said that he would so swear. "You
knew them both before, of course?" The witness declared that he had
never seen either of them before in his life. "And you expect the
jury to believe, now that the lives of these men depend on their
believing it, that after the lapse of a year you can identify these
two men, whom you had never seen before, and who were at that time
being carried along the road at the rate of eight or ten miles an
hour?" The witness, who had already encountered a good many of these
questions, and who was inclined to be rough rather than timid, said
that he didn't care twopence what the jury believed. It was simply
his business to tell what he knew. Then the judge looked at that
wicked witness,--who had talked in this wretched, jeering way about
twopence!--looked at him over his spectacles, and shaking his head as
though with pity at that witness's wickedness, cautioned him as to
the peril of his body, making, too, a marked reference to the peril
of his soul by that melancholy wagging of the head. Then the burly
barrister with the broad forehead looked up beseechingly to the jury.
Was it right that any man should be hung for any offence against whom
such a witness as this was brought up to give testimony? It was the
manifest feeling of the crowd in the court that the witness himself
ought to be hung immediately. "You may go down, sir," said the burly
barrister, giving an impression to those who looked on, but did not
understand, that the case was over as far as it depended on that
man's evidence. The burly barrister himself was not so sanguine.
He knew very well that the judge who had wagged his head in so
melancholy a way at the iniquity of a witness who had dared to
say that he didn't care twopence, would, when he was summing up,
refer to the presence of the two prisoners in the cart as a thing
fairly supported by evidence. The amount of the