sires to promote
Justice."

"Let the man be sworn."

So Benjamin was placed in the box, and stood prominent in his rags
before them all. After he had been sworn, there was a pause; neither the
prosecution, nor the defence, knowing quite what to make of him.

At length the counsel for the Crown began, "Where were you on March the
3rd, the supposed day of the murder of Isaac Zahn?"

"I don't keep a diary. Of late, I haven't taken much account of dates.
But if you refer to the date of the thunderstorm, I may state that I was
in my cave."

"Indeed. In your cave? That is most interesting. May I ask where your
cave may be?"

"In the mountains, not far from the track to Canvas Town."

"Dear me, that's very novel. When you are at home, you live in a cave.
You must be a sort of hermit. Do you know the prisoner?"

"Slightly."

"Did you meet him in your cave?"

"No; but there I saw the men who ought to be in the dock in his stead."

"Eh? What? Do you understand what you are saying?"

"Perfectly."

"Perfectly? Indeed. Have you come here to give evidence for the Crown
against the prisoner at the bar?"

"I have nothing to do with the prisoner. I have come to disclose the
guilty parties, who, so far as I am aware, never in their lives spoke
two words to the prisoner at the bar."

"Your Honour," said the bewildered barrister, "I have nothing further to
ask the witness. I frankly own that I consider him hardly accountable
for what he says--his general appearance, his manner of life, his
inability to reckon time, all point to mental eccentricity, to mental
eccentricity in an acute form."

But the counsel for the defence was on his feet.

"My good sir," he said, addressing the witness, with an urbanity of tone
and manner that Benjamin in his palmiest days could not have surpassed,
"putting aside all worry about dates, or the case for the Crown, or the
prisoner at the bar, none of which need concern you in the slightest
degree, kindly tell the jury what occurred in your cave on the day of
the thunderstorm."

"Four men entered, and from the place where I lay hid I overheard their
conversation. It referred to the murder of Isaac Zahn."

"Exactly what I should have imagined. Did you know the four men? Who
were they? What were their names?"

"I knew the names they went by, and I recognised their faces as those of
men I had met in Timber Town."

"Tell the jury all that you heard them say and all that you saw them do