and a sick wife and a squad of kids and, faith, he'll dissolve
in tears on the bench.
--Ay, says Alf. Reuben J was bloody lucky he didn't clap him in the dock
the other day for suing poor little Gumley that's minding stones, for
the corporation there near Butt bridge.
And he starts taking off the old recorder letting on to cry:
--A most scandalous thing! This poor hardworking man! How many children?
Ten, did you say?
--Yes, your worship. And my wife has the typhoid.
--And the wife with typhoid fever! Scandalous! Leave the court
immediately, sir. No, sir, I'll make no order for payment. How dare you,
sir, come up before me and ask me to make an order! A poor hardworking
industrious man! I dismiss the case.
And whereas on the sixteenth day of the month of the oxeyed goddess and
in the third week after the feastday of the Holy and Undivided Trinity,
the daughter of the skies, the virgin moon being then in her first
quarter, it came to pass that those learned judges repaired them to the
halls of law. There master Courtenay, sitting in his own chamber, gave
his rede and master Justice Andrews, sitting without a jury in the
probate court, weighed well and pondered the claim of the first
chargeant upon the property in the matter of the will propounded and
final testamentary disposition _in re_ the real and personal estate of
the late lamented Jacob Halliday, vintner, deceased, versus Livingstone,
an infant, of unsound mind, and another. And to the solemn court of
Green street there came sir Frederick the Falconer. And he sat him there
about the hour of five o'clock to administer the law of the brehons at
the commission for all that and those parts to be holden in and for the
county of the city of Dublin. And there sat with him the high sinhedrim
of the twelve tribes of Iar, for every tribe one man, of the tribe of
Patrick and of the tribe of Hugh and of the tribe of Owen and of the
tribe of Conn and of the tribe of Oscar and of the tribe of Fergus and
of the tribe of Finn and of the tribe of Dermot and of the tribe of
Cormac and of the tribe of Kevin and of the tribe of Caolte and of the
tribe of Ossian, there being in all twelve good men and true. And he
conjured them by Him who died on rood that they should well and
truly try and true deliverance make in the issue joined between their
sovereign lord the king and the prisoner at the bar and true verdict
give according to the evidence so help them God and kiss the
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