e situate,
feloniously, burglariously did break into and enter with intent to
commit a crime therein, to wit, the goods, chattels and personal
property of the said Jones then and there being found, then and there
feloniously and burglariously by force of arms and against the peace of
the people to seize, appropriate and carry away, raised his voice in
anguish and cried:

"Fo de Lawd sake, jedge, Ah didn't do none ob dem tings--all Ah done was
to take a couple ob chickens!"

Thus to annihilate a man by pad and pencil is indeed an art worthy of
admiration. The pen of an indictment clerk is oft mightier than the
sword of a Lionheart, the brain behind the subtle quill far defter than
said swordsman's skill. Moreover, the ingenuity necessary to draft one
of these documents is not confined to its mere successful composition,
for having achieved the miraculous feat of alleging in fourteen ways
without punctuation that the defendant did something, and with a final
fanfare of "saids" and "to wits" inserted his verb where no one will
ever find it, the indicter must then be able to unwind himself, rolling
in and out among the "dids" and "thens" and "theres" until he is once
more safely upon the terra firma of foolscap at the head of the first
page.

Mr. Caput Magnus could do it--with the aid of a volume of printed forms
devised in the days of Jeremy Bentham. In fact, like a camel who smells
water afar off, he could in a desert of verbal sand unerringly find an
oasis of meaning. Therefore was Caput Magnus held in high honor among
the pack of human hounds who bayed at the call of Huntsman Peckham's
horn. Others might lose the scent of what it was all about in the
tropical jungle of an indictment eleven pages long, but not he. Like the
old dog in Masefield's "Reynard the Fox," Mr. Magnus would work through
ditches full of legal slime, nose through thorn thickets of confusion,
dash through copses and spinneys of words and phrases, until he snapped
close at the heels of intelligibility. The Honorable Peckham couldn't
have drawn an indictment to save his legal life. Neither could any of
the rest. Neither could Caput without his book of ancient forms--though
he didn't let anybody know it.

Shrouded in mystery on a salary of five thousand dollars a year, Caput
sat in the shrine of his inner office producing literature of a clarity
equaled only by that of George Meredith or Mr. Henry James. He was the
Great Accuser. He could call a ma