Something to the purpose, judge!—Have a care—you know me—
Silence!
Judge—judge—I have said more than you six will ever be able to answer, though you keep your heads together to all eternity—How can you answer what I say?
How—in five words....
In five words!
I ask no more to satisfy all that hear me—my brethren of the bench, the bar, and the people—but five words, I tell you.
And what are they, I do beseech you?...
The—wisdom—of—our—ancestors.
CHAPTER X.
Here the lawyer started up, and after prevailing upon Burroughs to forbear and be still, argued (with his face to the jury) five or six points of law, as he called them, every one of which had been argued over and over again at every trial of a serious charge that he had ever been occupied with in the whole course of a long life at the bar ... four being about the propriety of capital punishments in general, and two about the propriety of capital punishments in the particular case of the prisoner at the bar—whom he protested before God (for which he had to pay thirteen-pence more) he believed to be innocent of the charge—and what was that charge?—nothing more nor less than the charge of sorcery and witchcraft!—a crime, the very possibility of which, he proceeded to deny, in the very language he had used about a twelvemonth before, while arguing about the impossibility of marriage in a particular case.