the courts very dull. At a little place called Akilas the following scene occurred recently : The magistrate ordered a prisoner to be brought in with the prosecutor and witnesses. The culprit was charged with stealing two yens, about $1.60. "What have you to say?" asked the magistrate. "The prisoner stole my money," answered the prosecutor. "What do the witnesses say?" inquired the magistrate. "I saw him in the act," was the reply of each one. Then the magistrate said to the prisoner : "Four weeks' imprisonment for stealing; I will send the prosecutor to jail one week for not being smart enough to- keep his own money, and sen tence the witnesses for the same time for not minding their own business." It must be a human frailty to delight in law suits. Some people seem to find their chief pleas ure in being miserable over them. The Buffalo "Courier " cites an instance of litigation long drawn out. The suit is that of Polen against Bushnell, now before a referee in New York, and it is enjoying the twenty-seventh year of its continu ance. During its progress death has overtaken the defendant, the original referee, four judges, three county clerks, and the original parties in in terest. The present referee has been engaged on it seventeen years, and the present stenographer eleven years. One lawyer has been in it from the start, but he has grown so deaf that he has to call in other lawyers to help him. The notes of one of the stenographers were found in the Kings County poorhouse, of which the stenographer was an inmate, and the lad who was sent to subpoena him is now a middle-aged man. The interest on the sum originally claimed would have twice doubled it since the case began. The costs in volved are greater than the original claim, and there is nobody to whom the judgment can be paid if one is secured. But the case may outlast another generation. Laymen often wonder at the wrangling of coun sel about the form in which a question should be put, one form being eventually decided by the court as proper and the other improper, while as a matter of fact the interrogatory so far as the wit ness is concerned is the same in either case, and
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the answer and its effect on the jury also the same; but as showing that there is danger in not carefully formulating a question, the following instance is to the point : — The action was one of tort, and a medical wit ness had testified that the injury to the plaintiff was in his opinion likely to prove a permanent one. Counsel for the defence, who by the way is one of the most brilliant and successful at the bar, at the close of a pretty rigid cross-examination put the following question, — "Doctor, are there not many cases recorded where persons who have been bedridden for years have suddenly been cured, miraculously as it were, by the laying on of hands, and have arisen and taken up their beds and walked?" The doctor, evidently well read in the Scrip tures, after an instant's delay to insure attention, replied, — "Well, sir, at this moment I can recall but one well-authenticated case." There was amusement throughout the court room, and the examination stopped there. Except for fatform of the question the doctor would not have had his chance. '• Respect for the laws; " that 's the English ex pression. They so venerate the laws that they never repeal them. It follows, often, that they don't execute them. An old law falls into desue tude like an ancient maiden; but they don't kill the one any more than they kill the other. They cease to practise them; that 's all. They leave both free to believe themselves young and beauti ful, dreaming that they are alive. This politeness they call respect for the laws. — Victor Hugo. A Minneapolis lawyer entered a demurrer to an indictment against a prisoner charged with having shot several fine hogs belonging to a neighbor, on the ground that the shooting of the animals in creased their value, as it saved the owner the expense of killing them. It would excite no little laughter now-a-days to see an advocate setting out for court attended by a long train of clients and admiring friends, and es corted to his home after the labors of the day amid their congratulations and applause. Yet this was the ordinary case at Rome, where, as it was the
