When Fanny woke me to receive my unrelished breakfast, she said:
"You've forgot that this is the day of trial; you sleep as unconsarned as though the trial was three weeks off. For my part, now that the baby is dead, I don't kere much what becomes of me."
"My cause," I replied, "is with God. To His keeping I have confided myself; therefore, I can sleep soundly."
"Have you got any lawyer?"
"No; I am a slave, and my master will not employ one."
After a few hours we heard the sound of a bell, that announced the opening of court. The jailer conducted me out of the jail yard into the Court House. It was the first time I had ever seen the interior of a court-room, when the court was in full session, and I was not very much edified by the sight.
The outside of the building was very tasteful and elegant, with most ornate decorations; but the interior was shocking. In the first place it was unfinished, and the bald, unplastered walls struck me as being exceedingly comfortless. Then the long, redundant cobwebs were gathered in festoons from rafter to rafter, whilst the floor was fairly tesselated with spots of tobacco-juice, which had been most dexterously ejected from certain legal orifices, commonly known as the mouths of lawyers, who, for want of opportunity to speak, resorted to chewing.
The judge, a lazy-looking old gentleman, sat in a time-worn arm-chair, ready to give his decision in the case of the Commonwealth versus Ann, slave of William Summerville; and seeming to me very much as though his opinion was made up without a hearing.
And there, ranged round his Honor, were the practitioners and members of the bar, all of them in seedy clothes, unshorn and unshaven. Here and there you would find a veteran of the bar, who claimed it as his especial privilege to outrage the King's or the President's English and common decency; and, as a matter of course, all the younger ones were aiming to imitate him; but, as it was impossible to do that in ability, they succeeded, to admiration, in copying his ill-manners.