al for Mills; and when
he looked over his brief, and thought of the case, he determined to have
it tried by a gentlemen jury, for although he was a great man with the
mob, he liked the country gentlemen better in the jury box, for he was
always coming out with quotations from the classics, which, whether the
grand jury understood or not, they always applauded very much. Well,
when he came into court that morning, you may guess his surprise and
mortification to find that the same jury that had tried a common
ejectment case, were still in the box, and waiting, by the chief
justice's direction, to try Mills versus Mulcahy, the great case of the
assizes.

"I hear they were a set of common clod-hopping wretches, with frize coats
and brogues, that no man could get round at all, for they were as cunning
as foxes, and could tell blarney from good sense, rather better than
people with better coats on them.

"Now, the moment that Mr. Purcell came into the court, after bowing
politely to the judge, he looked up to the box, and when he saw the dirty
faces of the dealers in pork and potatoes, and the unshaven chins of the
small farmers, his heart fell within him, and he knew in a minute how
little they'd care for the classics--if he quoted Caesar's Commentaries
itself for them--ignorant creatures as they were!

"Well, the cause was called, and up gets Peter, and he began to
'express', (as he always called it himself,) 'the great distress his
client and himself would labour under, if the patient and most
intelligent jury then on the panel should come to the consideration of so
very tedious a case as this promised to be, after their already most
fatiguing exertions;' he commented upon their absence from their wives
and families, their farms neglected, their crops hazarded, and in about
fifteen minutes he showed them they were, if not speedily released and
sent home, worse treated and harder used than many of the prisoners
condemned to three months imprisonment; and actually so far worked upon
the feelings of the chief himself, that he turned to the foreman of the
jury, and said, 'that although it was a great deviation from his habitual
practice, if at this pressing season their prospects were involved to the
extent the learned counsel had pictured, why then, that he would so far
bend his practice on this occasion, and they should be dismissed.' Now
Peter, I must confess, here showed the most culpable ignorance in not
knowing that