The barbarous system of "pleadings" was then in full vogue, though soon to be weeded out even in its parent England, and the law to be made a trial of facts instead of traverses, demurrers, avoidances, rebutters and surrebutters, churned out of the skim milk of words. Clayton's pleadings require a bold, dull mind to read them now, but he tired his adversaries out, and his cousin, Chief-Justice Clayton, who was jealous of him, had yet to decide in his favor.
Then, after the lapse of years, the issue came to trial at the old Dutch-English town of New Castle, and from the magnitude of the damages claimed, the weight and number of counsel, and the novelty of trying a great corporation, it interested the lawyers and burdened the newspapers, and was popularly supposed to belong to the class of French spoliation claims, or squaring-the-circle problems—something that would be going on at the final end of the world.
"Never you mind, Bob Frame! Walter Jones is a great advocate, but, Goy! he don't know a Delaware jury. I'll get my country-seat, up here on the New Castle hills, out of this case," Clayton said, as he pitched quoits with his fellow-lawyers from Washington and Philadelphia, on the green battery where the Philadelphia steamer came in with the Southern passengers for the little stone-silled railroad.
John Randel, Jr., had ruined a fine engineer, to become a litigious man all his life.
He sued his successor and fellow New-Yorker, Engineer Wright, and was nonsuited. He garnisheed the canal officers, and beset the Legislature for remedial legislation, and threatened Clayton himself with damages; yet had such a fund of experience and such vitality that he kept the outer public beaten up, like the driving of wild beasts into the circle of the hunters. He had surveyed the great city of New York and planned its streets above the new City Hall. Elevated railroads were his projection half a century before they came about. He now looked upon engineering with indifference, and considered himself to have been born for the law.
In the midst of many other duties, Clayton, in course of time, convicted Whitecar of kidnapping, on negro testimony, having obtained a ruling to that end from his cousin, the chief-justice; and a constituent named Sorden (not the personage of our tale), being prosecuted for kidnapping, in order to spite Clayton, was cleared by him at Georgetown after a marvellous exhibition of jury eloquence, and repaid the obligation, years after our story closes, by breaking a party dead-lock in the Legislature of Delaware, where he became a member, and sending Mr. Clayton for the fourth time to the American senate.
The Entailed Hat became more common in the streets of Annapolis than it had been in Princess Anne, as Milburn pressed his bill for assistance year after year, and was shot through the back with slanders from home and hustled in front by overwhelming opposition.
Judge Custis took the field for Congress on the railroad issue, and was elected, through the Forest vote, and his wife went through a Washington season with as much dignity as enjoyment, few suspecting that she was not the Judge's social equal.
The ancestral hat defied all worldly hostility, but became the iron helmet to bend its wearer's back. He prayed in secret for some pitying angel to break the spell that bound him to it, but none conceived that he would let it go.