‘I was there—that night. It was the night of the day I was turned out of doors—the night of the murder. How I came to be there, so far from my aunt’s neighbourhood, I don’t know, but I found myself working hard, helping to lift the stones and timber of the house-fronts that were blown in, and getting the poor crushed people out. I worked a long time, till I was like to drop; and a policeman clapped me on the back and gave me a word of praise and a drink of beer out of a can. I wonder where that policeman is now, and if he’d remember?’
He did not respond, wherever he might be. No one to help—no friendly plank to bridge over the yawning grave. What was it, this that I was trying so hard to recall?
‘I wandered off after that into the by-streets. I knew those parts well. I had had a comrade who used to live there, and many a wicked and foolish prank we’d played thereabouts. The beer I had just drunk on an empty stomach had muddled me again a bit, but I was quite sober enough to know every step of the way I went, and remember it now. I turned up Hoadley Street, and then to the left along Blewitt Street; and just when my aunt must have been struggling with the wretch that took her life, whoever it was, I heard a clock strike eight. I did, gentlemen, and I suppose I never thought of it since; but now I remember it as clear as day. I was standing at the time at the corner of Hauraki Street.’
It all came back to me in a moment! I heard the patter of the rain on the cab-roof—I saw the gleam of the infrequent lights on the wet flags—I listened to the objurgations of the cabman at the obstructing dray—I took note of the reflection in the mirror, the queer street-name which would not rhyme so as to make sense. The strokes of the clock striking eight were in my ears. I saw the lamp at the corner, and the man underneath looking up at it—the man with the short broad face, the sharp chin, the long thin mouth turned down at the corners, and the blank in the front teeth—the innocent man I was hounding to his death—the prisoner at the bar!
As I sprang to my feet, down with a crash went my bag full of papers, my hat and umbrella, so that even the impassive judge gave a start, and the usher, waking up, once more proclaimed ‘Si-lence!’ with shocked and injured inflection. Heedless of the majesty of the law, I beckoned to my counsel, and as he leaned over to me in surprise, I whispered earnestly in his ear. I never saw the human face express more entire astonishment. However, seeing that I was unmistakably in earnest, he merely nodded and rose to his feet.
‘Your lordship will pardon me,’ he said, ‘for interfering at this stage between the prisoner and the jury; but I am instructed to make a communication which I feel sure will be as astounding to your lordship and the jury as it is to myself. I think I may say that it is the most surprising and unprecedented thing which ever occurred in a court of justice. My lord, the solicitor who instructs me to prosecute tenders himself as a witness for the defence!’
OUR HEALTH.
BY DR ANDREW WILSON, F.R.S.E.
II. FOOD AND HEALTH.
From the point of view of the political economist, the idle man has no right to participate in the food-supply of the active worker. Whatever may be the correctness and force of the arguments which the economist may use by way of proving that the non-worker and non-producer has no right to participate in the ordinary nutritive supply of his fellows, the physiological standpoint assumes another and different aspect. The idle man grows hungry and thirsty with the regularity of the man who works. He demands food and drink as does his energetic companion; and the plea that idleness can need no food-support, may be met in a singularly happy and forcible fashion by a plain scientific consideration. In the first instance, the idle man might, by an appeal to science, show, that whilst he apparently spent life without exertion, his bodily functions really represented in their ordinary working an immense amount of labour. Sleeping or waking, that bodily pumping-engine the heart does not fail to discharge its work, in the circulation of the blood. The rise and fall of the chest in the sleeping man remind us that it is not death but his ‘twin-brother sleep,’ that we are observing. If we make a calculation respecting the work which the heart of a man, idle or active, performs in twenty-four hours, we may discover that it represents an amount of labour equal to one hundred and twenty foot-tons. That is to say, if we could gather all the force expended by the heart during its work of twenty-four hours into one huge lift, such force would be equal to that required to raise one hundred and twenty tons-weight one foot high. Similarly, the work of the muscles of breathing in twenty-four hours, represents a force equal to that required to lift twenty-one tons one foot high. These are only two examples out of many, which the ordinary work and labour of mere vegetative existence, without taking into consideration any work performed—in the popular sense of the term—involves.