Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, No. 703

It is lucky for an offender when his judge puts himself in his place; justice is sure then to be tempered with mercy, as in the case of the snatcher of spoons brought before a Georgian court many years ago. Bela Brown, who then went the circuit as judge, was an able man, in equal repute as a lawyer and as a boon-companion. The night before the court was to open at Dayton, his Honour went to a tavern kept by Sterrit, and had such a good time of it with his legal friends that by midnight he was not quite so sober as a judge should be. Somebody cleared the table of all its spoons, and put them into the unconscious gentleman's pocket. He was greatly perturbed at finding them there next morning. They were Sterrit's spoons without doubt, for they bore the landlord's initials.

'Polly,' said the judge to his wife, 'was I tipsy when I came home?'

'Yes,' said she. 'You know your habits when you get among those lawyers.'

Much relieved in his mind, the judge declared he could understand how the spoons came into his possession. 'That fellow keeps the meanest liquor in the States; but I never supposed it would make a man steal.'

A day or two afterwards, a man was arraigned for larceny; he pleaded guilty, but urged he was intoxicated when he committed the offence.

'What's the nature of the charge?' inquired Judge Brown.

'Stealing money from the till at Sterrit's tavern,' replied the clerk.

'Young man,' said the judge solemnly, 'are you sure you were tipsy when you took this money?'

'Yes, your Honour; when I went outdoors the ground kept coming up and hitting me on the head.'

'That will do. Did you get all your liquor at Sterrit's?'

'Every drop, sir.'

Turning to the prosecuting attorney, the judge said: 'You will do me the favour of entering a nolle prosequi; that liquor of Sterrit's I have reason to know is enough to make a man do anything dirty. I got tipsy on it myself the other night, and stole all his spoons. If Sterrit will sell such abominable stuff he ought not to have the protection of this court. – Mr Sheriff, you may release the prisoner.' Like the sailor who objected to his captain preaching and flogging too, offenders generally do not appreciate being suitably admonished as well as punished; and no doubt the Californian felt annoyed when, through incautiously demurring to the magistrate reproaching him with having no ambition, he found himself put to the question with: 'Where is it, sir? Where is it? Did you ever hear of Cicero taking free lunches? Did you ever hear that Plato gamboled through the alleys of Athens? Did you ever hear Demosthenes accused of sleeping under a coal-shed? If you would be a Plato, there would be a fire in your eye; your hair would have an intellectual cut; you'd step into a clean shirt; and you'd hire a mowing-machine to pare those finger-nails. You have got to go up for four months!'

The Honourable Kiah Rodgers, commonly called Old Kye, presiding in a Louisiana court, thus spoke his mind to a delinquent named Kettles: 'Prisoner, stand up! Mr Kettles, this court is under the painful necessity of passing sentence of the law upon you. This court has no doubt, Mr Kettles, but what you were brought into this scrape by the use of intoxicating liquors. The friends of this court all know that if there is any vice this court abhors it is intoxication. When this court was a young man, Mr Kettles, it was considerably inclined to drink, and the friends of this court know that this court has naterally a very high temper; and if this court had not stopped short off, I have no doubt, sir, but what this court, sir, would have been in the Penitentiary or in its grave.'

Still more communicative was Judge Kye respecting his young days when summing up in an action brought by an overseer for wrongful dismissal from his situation.

'The jury,' said his Honour, 'will take notice that this court is well acquainted with the nature of the case. When this court first started in the world it followed the business of overseering, and if there is any business which this court understands, it's hosses, mules, and niggers; though this court never overseed in its life for less than eight hundred dollars. And this court in hoss-racing was always naterally gifted; and this court in running a quarter race whar the hosses was turned, could allers turn a hoss so as to gain fifteen feet in a race; and on a certain occasion it was one of the conditions of the race that Kye Rodgers shouldn't turn narry of the hosses.' Surely it must have been Old Kye who upon taking his official seat for the first time, said: 'If this court know her duty, and she thinks she do, Justice will walk over this track with her head and tail up.'

Prone as he might be to discursiveness, we fancy the Louisiana judge would have laid down the law a little more lucidly than the worthy to whom a Minnesota juryman appealed for aid, when his ideas as to what constituted murder had been confused by the arguments of counsel.

'Gentlemen of the jury,' said this legal luminary, 'murder is where a man is murderously killed. The killer in such a case is a murderer. Now murder by poison is just as much murder as murder with a gun, pistol, or knife. It is the simple act of murdering that constitutes murder in the eye of the law. Don't let the ideas of murder and manslaughter confound you. Murder is one thing, manslaughter is quite another. Consequently, if there has been a murder, and it is not manslaughter, then it must be murder. Don't let this point escape you. Self-murder has nothing to do with this case. According to Blackstone and all the best living writers, one man cannot commit felo de se upon another; and that is clearly my view. Gentlemen, murder is murder. The murder of a brother is called fratricide; the murder of a father is called parricide, but that don't enter into this case. This case is murder, and as I said before, murder is most emphatically murder. You will take the case, gentlemen, and make up your minds according to the law and the evidence, not forgetting the explanation I have given you.' When an English judge has passed sentence upon a criminal, he has done with him. It would never enter his head to visit a man he had condemned to death. Judge Smith of Cincinnati had different notions of judicial etiquette. One Samuel Covert, about to be executed at Lebanon, had just taken his last meal, when the judge looked in, inquired how he felt, and asked for his autograph. Having obtained the autograph, and learned that Covert was pretty well, considering circumstances, the judge shook his hand warmly, saying: 'Good-bye, Mr Covert; I shall not see you again.'

'Good-bye, Mr Smith,' was the reply. 'Remember my last words to you: you have passed sentence of death upon an innocent man.'

'That is so, is it, Sam?' queried the visitor.

'Yes, sir.'

'If that be true, you've nothing against me; have you, Sam?'

'No, sir; you did your duty under the evidence.'

'Well, Sam, if you are an innocent man, it is a great calamity.'

'I am innocent,' repeated Covert.

The judge then departed, and Covert was marched to the scaffold.

Judge Smith hardly felt so easy in his mind as a Californian sheriff did after being interviewed by a self-confessed murderer, who desired to be sent to New York to answer for the crime he had committed in that city.

'So your conscience ain't easy, and you want to be hanged?' said the sheriff. 'Well, my friend, the county treasury ain't well fixed at present, and I don't want to take any risks, in case you're not the man, and are just fishing for a free ride. Besides, those New York courts can't be trusted to hang a man. As you say, you deserve to be killed, and your conscience won't be easy till you are killed, and as it can't make any difference to you or to society how you are killed, I guess I'll do the job myself!' and his hand moved to his pocket; but before he could pull out the revolver and level it at the murderer, that conscience-stricken individual was down the road and out of killing distance.

When lawyers behave in such a free-and-easy way, it is not surprising that a prisoner presumes to enter into familiar conversation with the bench. 'An old tippler,' asked by a Nevadan court whether he was rightly or wrongly charged with being intoxicated, pleaded, 'Not guilty, your Honour. Sunstroke!'

'Sunstroke?' queried Judge Cox.

'Yes, sir; the regular New York variety.'

'You've had sunstroke a good deal in your time, I believe?'

'Yes, your Honour; but this last attack was most severe.'

'Does sunstroke make you rush through the streets offering to fight the town?'

'That's the effect precisely.'

'And makes you throw brickbats at people?'

'That's it, judge. I see you understand the symptoms; and agree with the best recognised authorities, who hold it inflames the organs of combativeness and destructiveness. When a man of my temperament gets a good square sunstroke he's liable to do almost anything.'

'Yes; you are quite right – liable to go to jail for fifteen days. You'll go down with the policeman at once.' With that observation the conversation naturally closed, and the victim of so-called sunstroke 'went down.'

The bench does not always come off so victoriously. A prisoner before the court of Keatingville, Montana, neglecting to remove his hat, the sheriff was directed to do it for him, and obeyed instructions by knocking the offending head-gear off with his rifle. The owner picked it up, and as he clapped it on his head again shouted: 'I am bald, judge!' A repetition of the performance followed; at which, waxing indignant, his Honour rose and said: 'I fine you five dollars for contempt of court – to be committed until the fine is paid!'

The offender walked up to the judge, and laying down half a dollar, remarked: 'Your sentence, judge, is most ungentlemanly; but the law is imperative, and I will have to stand it; so here is half a dollar; and the four dollars and a half you owed me when we stopped playing poker this morning, makes us square!'

The card-playing administrator of justice must have felt as small as his brother-judge when he priced the cow. Being at Little Rock, Arkansas, on business, that judge strolled into the market, and seeing a farmer with a cow, stepped up to him and asked what he wanted for her. 'Thirty dollars,' said the farmer. 'She'll give you five quarts of milk if you feed her well.'

'Why,' quoth the judge, 'I have cows on my farm, not much more than half as big as yours, which give twenty quarts a day.'

The cow-owner eyed his new acquaintance very hard, as if trying to remember if he had seen him before, and then inquired where he lived. 'My home is in Iowa,' was the reply.

'Yes, stranger,' said the farmer, 'I don't dispute it. There were heaps of soldiers from Iowa down here during the war, and they were the worst liars in the whole Yankee army. Maybe you may have been an officer in some of them regiments?'

Without satisfying his interlocutor's curiosity on that point, the judge, we are told, 'slid for the court-house.'

THE FAIRIES

Where are the wonderful elves, and the fairy creatures bright?
Where are the tiny things that danced in the pale moonlight?
Danced in a magic ring, and fluttered in robes of white,
Like motes in the sunbeam whirled, like leaves in the forest hoar.

Hark to the sound of the sea, and the cry of the waves on the shore.
Where are the dusky gnomes who toiled in the golden ground?
So that the miners trembled hearing their hammers' sound,
Hearing them tapping, tapping, delving in darkness bound,