Sir Felix pulled out his watch, and asked me what I made the time.

'Off we drove,' pursued Lord Rattley, ignoring this hint, 'and I must have dropped asleep at once. When I awoke the blessed vehicle had come to a standstill. I called to Oke—no answer: so by-and-by I opened the carriage door and stepped out. The horses had slewed themselves in towards the hedge and were cropping peaceably: but no Oke was on the box and still no Oke answered from anywhere when I shouted. He had, as a fact, tumbled clean off the box half a mile astern, and was lying at that moment in the middle of the road. At that hour I had no mind to look for him, so I collected the reins somehow, climbed up in front, and drove myself home. I had a butler then by the name of Ibbetson—a most respectable man, with the face of a Bible Christian minister; and, thought I, on my way up the drive, "I'll give Ibbetson a small scare." So coming to the porch, when Ibbetson heard the wheels and cast the door open, I kept my seat like a rock. Pretty well pitch dark it was where I sat behind the lamps. Ibbetson comes down the steps, opens the carriage door and stands aside. After a moment he begins to breathe hard, pops his head into the brougham, then his arm, feels about a bit, and comes forward for a lamp. "My God, Bill!" says Ibbetson, looking up at me in the dark. "What have you done with th' ould devil?"'

'I really think,' suggested Sir Felix hurriedly, 'we ought not to keep the Court waiting.'

So in we filed, and the Court rose respectfully to its feet and stood while we took our seats. The Superintendent of Police—an officer new to our Division—gazed at me with a perfectly stolid face across the baize-covered table. Yet somehow it struck me that the atmosphere in Court was not, as usual, merely stuffy, but electrical; that the faces of our old and tried constabulary twitched with some suppressed excitement; and that the Clerk was fidgeting with an attack of nerves.

'Certain supplementary cases, your Worship,' said he, taking a small sheaf of papers from the hands of his underling, 'too late to be included on the charge-sheet issued.'

'Eh?—Oh, certainly—certainly!' Sir Felix drew his spectacle case from his waistcoat pocket and laid it on the table; took the paper handed to him, and slipped it methodically beneath the sheet of agenda; resumed the business of extracting his spectacles, adjusted them, and gravely opened business.

He had it all to himself. For me, as I, too, received the paper of supplementary cases, my first thought was of simple astonishment at the length of the list. Then my gaze stiffened upon certain names, and by degrees as I recognised them, my whole body grew rigid in my chair. Samuel Sleeman—this was the Superintendent's name—appellant against Isaac Adamson, drunk and disorderly; Ditto against Duncan McPhae, drunk and disorderly; Ditto against Henry James Walters, drunk and disorderly; Ditto against Selina Mary Wilkins, drunk on licensed premises; Ditto against Mary Curtis, drunk on licensed premises; Ditto against Solomon Tregaskis, drunk on highway. . . . There were no less than twenty-four names on the list; and each was the name of a retainer or pensioner of Sir Felix—those aged Arcadians of Kirris-vean.

I glanced along the table and winced as I met Sir Felix's eyes. He was inclining towards me. 'Five shillings and costs will meet this case, eh?' he was asking. I nodded, though without a notion of what case we were hearing. (It turned out to be one of cattle-straying, so no great harm was done.) Beyond him I saw Lord Rattley covering an infernally wicked grin with his arched palm; beyond Lord Rattley two estimable magistrates staring at that fatal supplementary paper as though they had dined and this was a bill they found themselves wholly unable to meet.

Sir Felix from time to time finds his awards of justice gently disputed. No one disputed them to-day. Lord Rattley, whose language is younger than his years, declared afterwards—between explosions of indecent mirth—that we left the floor to the old man, and he waltzed. He fined three parents for not sending their children to school, made out an attendance order upon another, mulcted a youth in five shillings for riding a bicycle without a light, charged a navvy ten shillings and costs for use of indelicate language (total, seventeen and sixpence), and threatened, but did not punish, a farmer with imprisonment for working a horse 'when,' as the charge put it ambiguously, 'in an unfit state.' He wound up by transferring an alehouse licence, still in his stride, beamed around and observed 'That concludes our business, I think—eh, Mr Clerk?'

'Supplementary cases, y'r Worship,' murmured the Clerk. 'If I may remind—paper handed to y'r Worship—'