rifling cases, such as a
magistrate could dispose of, but in all cases of magnitude possibly
involving penal servitude.

Once, however, I had made up my mind as to what was, in accordance
with my judgment, the sentence to be passed, I took care never to
alter it upon any plea in mitigation whatever.

For this line of conduct I had the example of Sir Thomas Wilde, when,
as Lord Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, he travelled the
Home Circuit. He was a marvellous and powerful judge in dealing with
the facts of a case. He had tried a prisoner for larceny in stealing
from a house a sack of peas. The prisoner's counsel had made for him
a very poor and absurd defence, in which, over and over again, he had
reiterated that one pea was very like another pea, and that he would
be a bold man who would swear to the identity of two peas.

This miserable defence made the Lord Chief Justice angry, and he
summed up the case tersely but crushingly to this effect: "Gentlemen,
you have been told by the learned counsel very truly that one pea is
very like another pea, and if the only evidence in this case had been
that one pea had been taken from the house of the prosecutor, and a
similar pea had been found in the prisoners house, I for one should
have said it would have been insufficient evidence to justify the
accusation that the prisoner had taken it.

"But such are _not_ the facts of this case; and when you find, as was
the fact here, that on March 30 a sack appears in a particular place,
marked with the prosecutor's initials, safe in his house at night,
where it ought to have been but was not, on the morning of the 31st;
and when you find that on that morning a sack of peas of precisely
similar character was in the house of the prisoner in a precisely
similar sack behind the door, the question very naturally arises, _How
came_ those peas in that man's house? He says he found them; do you
believe him? Did it ever occur to you, gentlemen, to find a similar
sack of peas in the dead of the night on any road on which you chanced
to be travelling?

"The prosecutor says the prisoner stole them, and that is the question
I ask you to answer. Did he or not, in your opinion, steal them?"

I need not say what the verdict was. The man was _put back for
sentence_. That is the point I am upon.

On the following morning the Lord Chief Justice, still a bit angry
with the prisoner's counsel for the miserable imposture he had
attempted