Page:A La California.djvu/397

in Tuolumne was Judge Hollowbarn, a shrewd, unpolished, slightly educated, and, as his enemies were wont to say, not over-scrupulous man from the mountain districts of Tennessee, "nigh unto the Kaintucky line." He was a natural genius; and had he come into the world a few years later, and taken to patriotism and politics instead of whisky and the law, would have become a millionaire, and made his mark in the world. He was one of the old school, and believed in State rights and such a construction of the Constitution as would least hamper and encumber him in the discharge of the duties of his office as he understood them. His school believed that all powers not expressly delegated by the Constitution to the Federal Government were intended to be reserved to the States as the high contracting parties and first repository of authority. By parity of reasoning he had arrived at the conclusion that the Justice's Court, being the first on the list and nearest the people, the source of all authority, was entitled to exercise all the powers not specially prohibited by statute. This crave him a wide range in cases both civil and criminal, and he played his hand for all it was worth, and literally went for everything there was in sight. He was also fully satisfied that what he had a right, as a magistrate, to do, he had also in the same capacity the right to undo. Thus, if he could marry a couple—and the statutes clearly gave him that power—it followed that he could divorce them again. It is true that the law conferred the power of granting divorces on the higher court, but