WANDERED FROM THE RECORD. AT a recent bar dinner, in responding to the toast, "Stories of By-gone Days/' Judge Edward Higbee of Schuyler County, Missouri, tendered this evidence: This occurred in the days of the late Judge John W. Henry, then a jurist well advanced in years and fame. The yarn I will relate is a matter of record, but so as not to disturb the sleep of the dead, or occasion heart pangs to the living, some of the names used will be fictitious. Way back in the seventies, Colonel John S. Wilson and Honorable Arthur Dabney were well-known lawyers of the then 2/th judicial circuit. Wilson and Dabney pos sessed all the fire and enthusiasm that char acterized the old-time barristers, and were generally on opposite sides of every impor tant case. The colonel was tall, dignified and severe. Dabney was smaller and more active, but far less prepossessing. Outside the courtroom they were very good friends, but when in action the average spectator would be in momentary dread of bloodshed. On one occasion, however, there was a rup ture between the two lawyers that extended outside, and for nearly a year they were not on speaking terms. Dabney was represent ing a man Comstock, who had something of a reputation as a Shylock, in a suit for rent against a delinquent tenant. When the time came for arguments, Colonel Wilson felt justified in relating a little of Comstock's history from his personal knowledge. He told of how the plaintiff had foreclosed a mortgage on a preacher and turned him out of house and home, with a sick wife and a half dozen or so small children. Nothing of the sort had been introduced in evidence, and everybody was astonished at Dabney for letting his opponent thus wander from the record. The colonel, with eloquent verbal paint
brush, sketched a terrible picture of the suf ferings of the preacher and his homeless flock, and the jury began to look vindictively at Comstock, who shifted in his seat and did his best to look unconcerned. The money lender was beat when the colonel sat down, but Dabney had the close. He began by re ferring to the colonel's flagrant disregard of the record, but said his man had never com mitted an act in his life of which he was ashamed, and that he had nothing to conceal. Therefore, he had not objected to the op posing advocate's conduct except in one re spect. "My learned friend, Colonel Wilson, told you the truth, gentlemen —a part of the truth," said Dabney, with unusual impressiveness. "But he didn't go back far enough. Why didn't he tell you the reason Mr. Com stock foreclosed his mortgage on Parson Smith's home? Ah, gentlemen, he who hides a part of the truth is worse than he who misrepresents it all. It now becomes my painful duty to tell why Mr. Comstock ex ercised his legal rights in foreclosing that mortgage. "You all know who occupies the place now (the jurymen tried to look as if they did. but not a one of them knew). The widow Dennis—that noble, white-haired old mother of Israel, who was so foully dispossessed of it ten years ago by this same bogus preacher. Smith, in a swindling scheme by which he traded her some worthless Nebraska land that was fit only to raise rocks and blizzards on! That's what he did. For ten long years the widow Dennis and her little fatherless children toiled and suffered. And what did Comstock do? Why, he waited and waited and waited. At last the land swindler, the whited sepulchre of a preacher, the robber of the widow and orphans, needed money; he goes to Comstock—the despised money
