“Not a farden, and wouldn’t take un; he bin a good maister to me as ever lived.”
“And you left him. Now then, sir, be careful; do you swear you heard Bumpkin say Snooks should not have the pig?”
“Have you been speaking to anyone about this case before to-day?”
“Be careful, sir, I warn you,” says Ricochet.
And here an air of triumph lit up the features of Mr. Ricochet.
“Never mind what he axed you;” said Ricochet, whose idea of humour consisted in the repetition of an illiterate observation; and he sat down—as well he might—after such an exhibition of the art of advocacy.
But on re-examination, it turned out that Mr. Locust had put several questions to Joe with a view of securing his evidence himself at a reasonable remuneration, and of contradicting Mr. Bumpkin.
This caused the jury to look at one another with grave faces and shake their heads.
Mr. Ricochet began and continued his speech in the same common-place style as his cross-examination; abusing everyone on the other side, especially that respectable solicitor, Mr. Prigg; and endeavouring to undo his own bad performance with the witness by a worse speech to the jury. What he was going to show, and what he was going to prove, was wonderful; everybody who had been called was guilty of perjury; everybody he was going to call would be a paragon of all the virtues. He expatiated upon the great common sense of the jury (as though they were fools), relied on their sound judgment and denounced the conduct of Mr. Bumpkin in the witness-box as a piece of artful acting, intended to appeal to the weakness of the jury. But all was useless. Snooks made a sorry figure in the box. He was too emphatic, too positive, too abusive. Mr. Ricochet could not get over his own cross-examination. The ridiculous counterclaim with its pettifogging innuendoes vanished before that common sense of the jury to which Mr. Ricochet so dryly appealed. The edifice erected by the modern pleader’s subtle craftiness was unsubstantial as the icy patterns on the window-pane, which a single breath can dissipate. And yet these ingenious contrivances were sufficient to give an unimportant case an appearance of substantiality which it otherwise would not have possessed.