the next morning. Next morning the judge, having slept on the case, was cool and col lected. " Put that man tip," he said, and the warder caused the prisoner to appear. Baron Martin then sentenced him to the heaviest punishment the law could inflict. Another version of this story says that on the morning in question the court was crowded with people, expectant of some such elaborate and eloquent speech to the prisoner as some judges would not have lost the chance of making. All that Baron Martin said was: "Prisoner at the bar, you're a very bad man. You'll have ten years of it." His breadth of view sometimes verged on grotesqueness when carried into the small details of practice. He not infrequently sat at Judges' Chambers, and on one occasion was asked to give an order for interroga tories, which in those days was always necessary in the common law courts. " How many are there?" asked the baron, without looking at them. " Twenty," was the reply. "I shan't make an order for a man to answer twenty interrogatories," rejoined the judge. "You may ask him half a dozen, and take which you please." Sometimes he preferred his native knowl edge of the law even to the express terms of an Act of Parliament. On his last circuit at Lewes, a partner was committed for trial for stealing partnership money. In charging the the out grandbill.jury," Whoever Martin told heard," them he to asked, throw j "of a man stealing his own money? It cannot be, gentlemen." The clerk of arraigns stood on his seat to hand up to the judge the Act of Parliament making it a felony to steal partnership money, but Martin would pay no attention. " Never mind the Act of Parliament, Mr. Avory; take it away. The man who drew that act knew nothing about the law of England." Baron Martin, sound as his decisions usually were, did not leave his mark on the Reports, because his mind was not of the
analytical order, and although he could hit the mark himself, he could not tell others how he did it. Sometimes his insight into equity led him right while others went astray. In Smyth v. North, Barons Martin and Pigott, notwithstanding the dissent of Baron Bramwell, held the view, which is now considered orthodox, that the word "surrender " in regard to the disclaimer of leases under the Bankruptcy Act has a sense of its own, and not the legal sense. If these stories are not enough, there -is one which suggests the key to Sir Samuel Martin's whole character. He asked a young lawyer how he was progressing in the law, and was told that its complications puzzled him. " Nonsense! " said Baron Martin; "bring your common sense to bear on it, mon. That's what I always do; and I generally find I'm right." His ready wit sometimes extricated him in an unexpected way from the intricacies of the net of subtlety woven around ques tions at the bar. Thus he was sitting in banco, with Baron Bramwell by his side, in the little room up many stairs, known as the second Vice-Chancellor's Court, at Westminster, now happily among the courts abandoned, while a long-winded counsel was "distinguishing" the case before them from a decision of the House of Lords. After painfully enduring the operation for some time, the Baron said, " You are very much mistaken, if you think that my brother Bramwell and I, sitting in this cock-loft, are going to overrule the House of Lords." One of the most sensational cases tried before him was the Hatton Garden murder, in which an Italian had been stabbed in a low public-house brawl. The curious thingwas the question of identity raised. Baron Martin convicted one man, Mr. Justice Byles another, so that two prisoners were lying under sentence of death for the same crime, one only of whom was guilty. The slow poi soning case referred to in 26 " Law Times,"
