to the spectators. The judge then ordered that a saddle should be stuffed with the hair of the prisoner, so that justice might ride triumphantly upon the mane of vice. It was expected that the alcaldes would send their decisions to the governor and await his approval, but Blackburn, to secure speedy execution of justice, usually carried out his sentence first, and then reported to gubernatorial power. The only book employed in this court was a New York directory.
When the early administration of justice in California swelled from the alcalde's courts of the first instance, Santa Cruz becoming ambitious organized one of these superior tribunals, and appointed over it a superior judge: As all good jurists drank in those days, and as the legal learning of a judge was to a great extent measured by his capacity for carrying fiery liquids, by this measurement Judge Brown of Santa Cruz was a most able man. The depth of him was profound. Late into the night, and oftentimes all night, saw him at his mellowing devotions; and when next morning he took his seat upon the bench his head was seemingly so enlarged as to encompass the universe with all its whirling;; worlds.
One morning a Spaniard was brought before him charged with stealing a horse. The judge was scarcely himself that day; his faculties seemed benumbed, lukewarm, dissolved in space, neither in the genial glow of original potations, nor yet in a state of glcmous insensibility. He was, as he would say, betwixt and between; too good to go to hell, too bad to go to heaven, and fit only to swell the limhiis fatuorum of paradisiacal fools. At such times the unstable consciousness his mind could grasp was not of a happy kind ; on the contrary while having least control of himself he was most self-willed and savage, so that on this morning he was almost as boastful in speech and as merciless in heart as any of Homer's heroes.
