lady-witness commence proceedings by re-tying
her bonnet-strings, or her boa? Why in the
thumb of her left hand glove is there almost
invariably an orifice, disclosing flesh? Why does
the dandy-deponent, the witness of the upper
Ten Thousand, when he leaves the box, contrive
to stumble over two out of the three steps that
lie between him and the floor of the court?

Why? Well; because the majority of witnesses
are nervous and irritable, you may answer. But you
don't see that greasy fatuous smile anywhere out
of a court of justice. The back-handed movement,
the painful pantomime with the hat, the stumble
over the stairs, the hole in the thumb of the left-hand
glove, belong to witnesses exclusively;
and witnesses themselves are, so runs my theory,
a race and type of humanity, apart. Some babies
are born with silver spoons, and others with
wooden ladles, in their mouths. I believe in an
order of children who are born with the ragged
dog's-eared book at their lips, by whose cradle
side the swearing usher stands, and who are
brought up as witnesses from the breast.

I have come to be within pistol-shot of forty
years of age, and I never was publicly examined
in any case, civil or criminal, in my life. And yet
I have lived, an 't please you, in a continually
simmering vat of hot water. Litigation! Why,
I know all the offices in Parchmentopolis as well
as any lawyer's clerk in his second year, and have
a whole tin box at home full of bills of costs and
green ferret. If the number of processes which
have been served upon me were all laid together
longitudinally, they would reach—say from
Doctors' Commons to Old Palace Yard.
Law-suits! I have been a party to scores of them.
Plaints! Her Majesty's attorney-general has
done me the honour to bring three several
actions against me in the Court of Exchequer,
and still I have never stood up in a witness-box,
never kissed the book, twiddled my hat, and
been told to look at the jury, to listen to the
judge, to pay particular attention to the examining
counsel, not forgetting general injunctions to
"speak up," and to be careful about what I said,
on pain of being committed for contempt, or
indicted for perjury.

I will admit that my legal testimony has more
than once been called for. What I have known, or
what other people chose to take it into their heads
that I have known, about the rights and wrongs
of certain quarrels, has, from time to time, made
many most respectable plaintiffs and defendants
anxious to "have me in the box," and to
subject the discreetly corked bottle of truth within
me, to the action, persuasive or coercive, of the
forensic corkscrew. It has never come to
anything. I have been subpœnaed over and over
again. I have touched that mysterious guinea
which the clerk, vegetating, perhaps, on a hopeless
five-and-twenty shillings a week, hands to you
with a grudging politeness—that guinea which
neither looks, nor feels, nor sounds, like other
money—and which, Vespasian's axiom nevertheless,
olet, for it smells of pounced vellum and
japanned tin—that guinea, which, somehow,
never seems to have been fairly come by,
or legitimately earned, but rather to be of
the nature of the demon's arles, and which
consequently you make all convenient haste to
spend in some wild waste or unholy prodigality.
I have a stuffed heron in a glass case at home;
I bought it with a subpœnal guinea. I bought
a chance in the Art-Union with another. I
divided a third between a share in the Frankfort
lottery, and a box of pills warranted to cure
all diseases, and the consumption of which
added about half a dozen to the ailments from
which I was already suffering. It is,
abstractedly, so monstrous and prodigious a thing
that the law should pay you anything, that the
primary fact of the donative begets recklessness
and mistrust. You feel, either that you are
taking the money of the widow and the orphan,
or that you are the stipendiary of a rogue.

With numerous subpœnas, how is it that the
usher has never called my name in court? If
litigants have been so anxious to "have me in
the box," how comes it that I have never
appeared in the box? Let fate and my destinal star
reply. Time after time have I gone down to
Westminster Hall, to Guildhall, nay, to Croydon
or Guildford, when an astute and penniless plaintiff,
wishing simply to annoy a wealthy defendant,
has laid the venue of a twenty-pound plaint in
Surrey or elsewhere, as far away from the real
scene of dispute as possible. Days have I
wasted and waited for the particular case I have
been concerned in, to come on; yet, like a boastful
but craven pugilist, it never has come on—at
least, it has never advanced to sufficient ripeness
for my advent to become an event. Either the
jury have, in an early stage of the case, shown
unmistakable signs that they had had enough of
it, or the judge has suggested an arrangement,
complimenting the parties on their high
respectability:—when the plaintiff was fully
prepared to show that the defendant was
twin-brother to Barabbas; whereas the defendant
was bent on calling me to prove that the habitual
turpitude of the plaintiff exceeded, on the
whole, that of Jonathan Wild, Sawney Bean,
and Mother Brownrigge. Likewise is it due in
justice to the bar of England to confess that
many of my cases in Westminster Hall have been
settled without going into court, through the
kind offices of the counsel employed on either
side. Who would imagine that so much
benevolence lurked beneath those spiky horsehair
wigs; that beneath those austere stuff gowns
such kindly hearts were beating? "Can't we
come to a friendly understanding?" says
Rubasore, Q.C., whom I always (quite erroneously, it
seems) assumed to be a most quarrelsome fellow.
"Come, now, my good sir," puts in Serjeant
Squallop, "is there no way of settling this
unpleasant little difference?" How glibly they
talk of the uncertainty of the law! How
delicately they hint at the inconvenience of one's
private affairs being sifted before a ribald
audience, and exposed next day in the newspapers!
How deftly they draw our attention to the
fact that one story is a good one till another is
told; that, strong as we may think our case,