With his right leg resting on his left, with his two thumbs nicely adjusted, and with the four points of his right fingers in delicate contact with the fingers of his left hand, sat Honest Lawyer Prigg, listening to the tale of unutterable woe, as recounted by Farmer Bumpkin.
Sometimes the good man’s eyes looked keenly at the farmer, and sometimes they scanned vacantly the ceiling, where a wandering fly seemed, like Mr. Bumpkin, in search of consolation or redress. Sometimes Mr. Prigg nodded his respectable head and shoulders in token of his comprehension of Mr. Bumpkin’s lucid statement: then he nodded two or three times in succession, implying that the Court was with Mr. Bumpkin, and occasionally he would utter with a soft soothing voice,
“Quite so!”
When he said “quite so,” he parted his fingers, and reunited them with great precision; then he softly tapped them together, closed his eyes, and seemed lost in profound meditation.
Here Mr. Bumpkin paused and stared. Was Mr. Prigg listening?
“Pray proceed,” said the lawyer, “I quite follow you;—never mind about what anybody else had offered you for the pig—the question really is whether you actually sold this pig to Snooks or not—whether the bargain was complete or inchoate.”
Mr. Bumpkin stared again. “I beant much of a scollard, sir,” he observed; “but I’ll take my oath I never sold un t’pig.”
“That is the question,” remarked the lawyer. “You say you did not? Quite so; had this Joe of yours any authority to receive money on your behalf?”
“Devil a bit,” answered Bumpkin.
“Excuse me,” said Mr. Prigg, “I have to put these questions: it is necessary that I should understand where we are: of course, if you did not sell the pig, he had no right whatever to come and take it out of the sty—it was a trespass?”