saying that a thief has done good with his plunder, isn't
it?" commented Peckham. "Look here, Tutt, of course I hope you get your
man off and all that, but if I personally threw the case out I'd have
all the vets in the city on my neck. You see the motors have pretty
nearly put 'em all out of business. There aren't enough sick horses to
go round, so they've been conducting a sort of crusade. Tough luck--but
the law is the law. And I have to enforce it--ostensibly, anyway."

"Very well," answered the old lawyer amiably but defiantly. "Then if
you've got to enforce the law against a fine old chap like that I've got
to do my darnedest to smash that law higher than a kite. And I'll tell
you something, Peckham--which is that the human heart is a damn sight
bigger than the human conscience."

* * * * *

Danny Lowry had lived for years in fear of the blow which had so
suddenly struck him down, for there had never been any blinking of the
obvious fact that in acting as an unlicensed veterinary he was brazenly
violating the law. On the other hand, not being able to read or write,
and having no technical knowledge of medicine, all his experience, all
his skill, all his love of animals could avail him nothing so far as
securing a license was concerned. He could not read an examination
paper, but he could interpret the symptoms seen in a trembling neck and
a lack-luster eye. Danny had no choice but to break the law or abandon
the only career for which he had an aptitude, or by which he could hope
to earn a living at his age. His crime was _malum prohibitum_, not
_malum in se_, but it was, nevertheless, a violation of a most necessary
law. Certainly none of us wish to be doctored by tyros or humbugs, or to
have our animals treated by them. Only Danny was neither a tyro nor a
humbug, and had he not been a lawbreaker the world would have been to
some extent the loser.

Yet by all the canons of ethics and justice it was most improper for Mr.
Tutt to hurry off to the Tombs and bail out old Danny Lowry, a
self-confessed lawbreaker, giving his own bond and the house on
Twenty-third Street as security. Still more so, as more unblushingly
ostentatious, was his taking the criminal over to Pont's and giving him
the very best dinner that Signor Faccini, proprietor of that celebrated
hostelry, could purvey.

Hard cases are said to make bad law; I wonder if they make bad people.
If "conscience makes cowards o