“Oh!” he cried, “it was you, then, was it? You’re the one that did it! I guessed as much! I knew you were at the bottom of it all along. What do you think of that, my lords and gentlemen?”
“The thing is,” drawled Edward the Second, “did Walter—”
“Order in the court!” cried Henry the Eighth. “Kindly allow me to conduct my own case. All you’ve got to say, Rufus, is whether it’s true what he says, that Walter Tyrrell shot you?”
“Him!” cried Rufus. “He couldn’t hit a haystack a yard off, if he tried.”
“Then he didn’t do it? That’s all right. Why couldn’t you have said so at once? All down, Nigger? That makes two lies. Now call up the next.”
“Henry the First, surnamed Beauclerk, never smiled again after his son was lost, and died of a surfeit of lampreys,” read the prince.
“Oh, those lampreys!” groaned Henry; “I am perfectly sick of them. I assure you, my lords and gentlemen, they were no more lampreys—”
“No, not after you’d done supper,” growled Rufus.
“In that case, William,” retorted Beauclerk, “I should have said ‘there,’ and not ‘they.’ But I do assure you, gentlemen, I never saw a lamprey in my life; and as for smiling again,” added he, in quite an apologetic way, “I did it often, when nobody was by; really I did.”
“Are you sure?” asked the judge. “Show us how you did it.”