The witness answered: "This is where Deceased was at, and over there I seen defendant standing just a little bit before He fired the shot, and over here Is where he stood and drunk his beer; And here's the place the man fell down and laid upon the floor." The shorthand man, of course, must make His record full, and had to take The words that seemed to make the thins: to every one so clear; But if he had forborne to write, And left the page untouched and white, He would have written just as much as that which did appear.
comes to cross-examine the expert witness, to whom these colossal words may seem commonplace, the stenographer is likely to wish witness and lawyer could look at things from his table. He has tried to express this idea in verse, as follows: When learned doctor, from the stand, With erudite pomposity, In words few jurors understand, Replete with ponderosity, Says plaintiff, from some force applied To occiput externally, About ten thousand deaths has died, And tortured is infernally; Then shows, in words grammatical, The case's etiology, Prognosis problematical And its obscure pathology;
Frequently three or four attorneys and the witness are all talking at once, while the court, too, is trying to get in a few words. While lawyer, with scholastic zeal. It must be apparent that'i on such occasions From lexicons and treatises. no human hand can take down every word Has stuffed his cranium till we feel uttered, and the stenographer must decide No brain is so complete as his, with lightning rapidity what is important and what is not. Any material omission And fires his questions intricate from the record would call down upon him With great impetuosity, the censure of court and counsel, and might While witness does not hesitate. do irreparable injury to one of the contest ants. But answers with velocity;— Where a trial relates to ordinary matters The shorthand man would like to be the words used are such as the stenographer Transferred to some locality, writes almost every day, and the outlines are as familiar to him as the letters of the Where such acute verbosity Alphabet. He instinctively makes them with Would end in quick mortality. scarcely any mental effort. In cases involv ing technical, scientific or medical questions But things will probably go on without much change. It would be a most uninter the words employed are of an entirely differ ent character, and he is constantly coming esting world if all people were alike. Impul across words he seldom has occasion to sive lawyers will continue to press; their ex write, and he necessarily writes them with aminations with great rapidity, and super-inconsiderable mental effort and with much jtelligc-nt witnesses will still live and air their less rapidity than those with which he is more learning. The stenographer must do the best familiar. When the rapid-talking lawyer he can to meet the emergencies as they arise.
