nd limited faculties in my best of moments, and I am now still
lower in the scale of intelligence. Were you to read that lucid document
till we were both gray-headed, it would leave me just as uninformed as
to imputed crime as I now am."

"I perceive," said he, gravely. Then, turning to his clerk, he bade
him write down, "'And the so-called Harpar, having duly heard and with
decorously-lent attention listened to the foregoing act, did thereupon
enter his plea of mental incapacity and derangement."

"Nay, Herr Procurator, I would simply record that, however open to
follow some plain narrative, the forms and subtleties of a legal
document only bewilder me."

"What for an ingeniously-worded and with-artifice-cunningly-conceived
excuse have we here?" exclaimed he, indignantly. "Is it from England,
with her seventeen hundred and odd volumes of an incomplete code, that
the Imperial and Royal Government is to learn legislation? You are
charged with offences that are known to every state of civilization:
highway assault and molestation; attack with arms and deadly implements,
stimulated by base and long heretofore and with-bitterness-imagined
plans of vengeance on your countryman and former associate, the so-named
Rigges. From him, too, proceeds the information as to your political
character, and the ever-to-be deplored and only-with-blood-expiated
error of republicanism by which you are actuated. This brief, but
not-the-less-on-that-account lucid exposition, it is my duty first
to read out, and then leave with you. With all your from-a-wrong-
impulse-proceeding and a-spirit-of-opposition-suggested objections, I
have no wish nor duty to meddle. The benign and ever paternal rule under
which we live gives even to the most-with-accusation-surrounded, and
with-strong-presumption-implicated prisoner, every facility of defence.
Having read and matured this indictment, you will, after a week, make
choice of an advocate."

"Am I to be confronted with my accuser?"

"I sincerely hope that the indecent spectacle of insulting attack and
offensive rejoinder thus suggested is unknown to the administration of
our law."

"How, then, can you be certain that I am the man he accuses of having
molested him?"

"You are not here to assail, nor I to defend, the with-ages-consolidated
and by-much-tact-accumulated wisdom of our Imperial and Royal Code."

"Might he not say, when he saw me, 'I never set eyes on this man
before'?"

He turned a