ERROR to the Circuit Court for the District of New Jersey; the case being thus:
By the practice in the courts of New Jersey, after a plaintiff rests his case, the defendant may move for a nonsuit; and if the court refuses to grant one, a bill of exceptions may be asked for, and on writ of error brought, the plaintiff in error may assign for error the refusal to grant the nonsuit.
By an act of Congress, approved June 1st, 1872, it is enacted,
'That the practice . . . and forms, and modes of proceeding, &c., in the Circuit . . . Courts of the United States shall conform as near as may be to the practice . . . and forms and modes of proceeding existing at the time in like cases, in the courts of record of the State within which such Circuit . . . Courts are held.'
In this state of the law, in June, 1871, Mrs. Pollard, a resident of Chicago, had taken passage by railroad, on a connecting line of roads, one of which was owned by the New Jersey Railroad Company (the defendant in this case), for herself, her two sisters, and her own daughter, a child of about thirteen years old, from Chicago vi a Philadelphia to New York; the purpose of the journey being refreshment in the summer and general improvement to health. The travelling party were in a Pullman palace car, and occupied what is known as a 'section' of it. This section was near the middle of the last car of the train where it was used for travelling and not for sleeping. It had two double seats, one at each end of the section, facing each other, so that persons who occupied the seat nearest the forward part of the car had to ride with their backs to the engine.
On the arrival of the party at Philadelphia, the train was composed of five passenger cars and a baggage car. But it being now the season of fruit, five fruit cars were added to the train before setting off for New York; these being put on to it between the locomotive and the passenger train. The train thus made up had in it eleven cars. Some freight cars were added afterwards.
Continuing their journey towards New York by night, when the train came within about thirty miles of the last-named city, or rather of Jersey City just opposite to it-it being now half-past five o'clock in the morning-the servant in charge of the Pullman cars aroused the passengers in them, informing them that they were reaching the end of their journey. Mrs. Pollard got up, and having with no unreasonable delay as it seemed dressed herself and her child, began to arrange the child's hair, brushing and plaiting it. She was standing in the section which her travelling party had occupied, with her back to the seat in which she had been sitting, and so looking towards the rear of the cars, the child standing before her. During this operation of arranging the child's hair, and when within about one hundred yards of the depot at Jersey City, the whole train was switched off upon a siding. The four passenger cars and the baggage car were detached or uncoupled from the fruit and freight cars, were attached by the drill-master to his engine, taken back over the same road beyond the switch, which was then adjusted to allow the cars to enter the passenger depot, and were then backed into the usual landing-place for the passengers. In this operation and just as the train was about to stop-the cars moving very slowly, so much so that some passengers at the moment were getting out of them on to the platform-one car bumped against another with a certain degree of force, and Mrs. Pollard was in some way thrown against the arm of the seat in which she had been sitting, striking, as testimony tended to prove must have been the case, the lower part of her spinal cord; a part of it which, as is known to medical men and surgeons, is very susceptible to anything like a blow, and which,-especially in case of women,-it is dangerous to fall upon. Mrs. Pollard was rendered quite unconscious by the blow, and the train being now completely stopped, she was carried by four men into a hotel near the station, where medical aid was soon obtained. Having been finally conveyed to her home in Chicago, it was soon found that the whole region about the lower part of the lumbar vertebrae and the sacrum was much injured, and that partial paralysis of the lower limbs was supervening. This went on, and power of locomotion, of course, was ultimately much impaired. Mrs. Pollard accordingly brought suit-the suit below-against the New Jersey Railroad Company, on whose road the accident occurred.