when case after case was called, imperturbably he sat, like Olympian Jove weighing in the balance the fates of Greek and Trojan, with no change of occupation, nor shiftings of position—only from his mouth shot thunderbolts of judgment, short, sharp and decisive.
In front of the table were usually three or four clerks and reporters, back of whom were litigants, lawyers, and witnesses, while a crowd of spectators and hangers-on filled the remainder of the room. The nuisance of a jury was seldom tolerated in this court. Decisions were reached partly by evidence and partly by intuition. The judge did what was right, as Sophocles said of Aeschylus, without knowing it. Seldom did he hear a case through, but when he thought he fairly comprehended it, he directed the clerk to enter judgment and call another case; and often these summary proceedings would continue until nine or ten o'clock at night.
Now it must not be inferred from all this that justice was not administered in this court, or that it was more uncertain here than elsewhere, or that it was more uncertain under the free and informal rulings of Almond, the quondam peanut-seller, than it would have been had Mansfield, or Marshall, or Stephens, or Story been seated in his place. In balancing the short, sharp encounters of busy men undergoing new and abnormal experiences, their learning would have hampered them like superfluous equipment, while the clear, free judgment of Almond directed his finger immediately to the root of a difficulty, which might be then eradicated without the aid of precedent. All their skilled intelligence would be employed in fitting experience to forms, while he had only the thing itself to deal with.
Almond determined the causes brought before him quickly, courageously, righteously. Rude, uncouth, illiterate so far as law learning went, there was a directness about him that suited the temper of the time. Everybody drank in those days; at least all
