hat eat up an entire box of
Seidlitz powders, and then hadn't any more judgment than to go and take a
drink. He was considered to be a great loss, but I never could see it.
Well, no matter about the names. Mrs. Brown wanted to be reasonable, but
Mrs. Jones wouldn't let her. She put her up to going to law for damages.
So to law she went, and had the face to claim seven shillings and
sixpence. It made a great stir. All the neighbors went to court.
Everybody took sides. It got hotter and hotter, and broke up all the
friendships for three hundred yards around friendships that had lasted
for generations and generations.

"Well, I proved by eleven witnesses that the cat was of a low character
and very ornery, and warn't worth a canceled postage-stamp, anyway,
taking the average of cats here; but I lost the case. What could I
expect? The system is all wrong here, and is bound to make revolution
and bloodshed some day. You see, they give the magistrate a poor little
starvation salary, and then turn him loose on the public to gouge for
fees and costs to live on. What is the natural result? Why, he never
looks into the justice of a case--never once. All he looks at is which
client has got the money. So this one piled the fees and costs and
everything on to me. I could pay specie, don't you see? and he knew
mighty well that if he put the verdict on to Mrs. Brown, where it
belonged, he'd have to take his swag in currency."

"Currency? Why, has Bermuda a currency?"

"Yes--onions. And they were forty per cent. discount, too, then, because
the season had been over as much as three months. So I lost my case.
I had to pay for that cat. But the general trouble the case made was the
worst thing about it. Broke up so much good feeling. The neighbors
don't speak to each other now. Mrs. Brown had named a child after me.
But she changed its name right away. She is a Baptist. Well, in the
course of baptizing it over again it got drowned. I was hoping we might
get to be friendly again some time or other, but of course this drowning
the child knocked that all out of the question. It would have saved a
world of heartbreak and ill blood if she had named it dry."

I knew by the sigh that this was honest. All this trouble and all this
destruction of confidence in the purity of the bench on account of a
seven-shilling lawsuit about a cat! Somehow, it seemed to "size" the
country.

At this point we observed that an Engl