anner. The whisperer is cowed at once.

Phil. Bird looks gratefully at the superintendent; the latter is grateful
in O'Connell's sense, and has a lively sense of favours to come.

"And the woman, what about her?" asks the magistrate.

"I believe generally she's very well behaved," says policeman Brown, as
if on the present occasion she had been guilty of an enormous offence.

"Do you know anything against her?"

"Not as I know of, yer worship."

"Well," says the magistrate, addressing the poor washerwoman, nervous and
"all of a tremble," as she afterwards confidentially informs a friend,
looking as if she expected immediate sentence of death passed upon her,
"what do you say to the charge? Mr Bird says you went and created a
disturbance in his shop; now you had no business to do that, you know."

"I know I hadn't, sir," said the poor woman; but here she burst into
tears.

Had she been alone with the magistrate, who is a kind-hearted man, and
wishes to do what is right, she would soon have found her tongue, and her
warm appeal, told with natural eloquence, because told out of a full
heart, would soon have reached his own; but she is frightened--her
energies are paralysed,--she cannot speak at all.

"Oh, Brown," says the magistrate, as if a bright thought struck him, "was
the woman sober?"

"Well, I can't swear that she was drunk," said Brown, reluctantly.

This by no means helps to soothe the poor woman's nerves, but it drives
her to speak in her own behalf.

"Your worship," she exclaims, "I was as sober as you are now"--she might
have added, but she did not, "and a good deal more sober than policeman
Brown." "I did go to Phil. Bird's, but it was to fetch my husband out,
who had been inveigled in there, and had been led into spending all the
money he had, and getting drunk."

"Well, my good woman, the publican must be protected. You should not
have created a disturbance. I shan't inflict a fine, but you must pay
the costs. You may go down."

And so the time of the magistrate is taken up; not one case out of ten
comes to anything; but the officiousness of the police is shown; the lazy
and good-for-nothing part of the public have a gratuitous entertainment
provided for them, and the criminal class get an initiation into the
secrets of the law, which robs it of its terrors, as in such matters it
is especially true familiarity breeds contempt. Most of the lads and
girls--especially the latter--placed a