that duty like brave men and true, and so keep the oath which they had sworn to Almighty God. Counsel resumed his seat after a speech of astonishing power, and the court adjourned for luncheon.
Tom neither bit nor supped. “There’s still Culliford,” he kept saying to himself, “and compared with the other, he’s a giant to a dwarf. But what can he find to say to all that? Oh, what can he find to say for me now?” And the elderly turnkey’s pitying glances were a bitterer thing than his involuntary insult of the day before.
Culliford’s great speech may be dismissed in the shortest space, since only a verbatim report could do justice to the passionate eloquence and artistic force of an oration which held the court entranced for close upon two hours. And even then you would lose the dramatic pauses, the fine use of emphasis, the infinite variety of tone, now passionate, now persuasive, now sweetly reasonable; the slow movements and the quick—in a word, the masterly manipulation, by this born advocate, of every note in the oratorical gamut.
The speech opened with wholesale denunciations of a “virulent prosecution,” its “witnesses corrupt with prejudice” and their “back-handed identifications,” but especially of “that miserable gang of petty cheats—that school of sharks—of whom the witness Vale was a pretty specimen, and the dead man Blaydes the acknowledged ringleader.” Was such a man likely to have but one enemy swearing vengeance upon his discreetly hidden head? More probably a hundred, any one of whom might have committed this crime, and any one of whom might have pleaded unparalleled extenuation into the bargain. Why, the man carried a sword-stick—even to an evening party—to protect his
