'Yes, your Honour; when I went outdoors the ground kept coming up and hitting me on the head.'
'That will do. Did you get all your liquor at Sterrit's?'
'Every drop, sir.'
Turning to the prosecuting attorney, the judge said: 'You will do me the favour of entering a nolle prosequi; that liquor of Sterrit's I have reason to know is enough to make a man do anything dirty. I got tipsy on it myself the other night, and stole all his spoons. If Sterrit will sell such abominable stuff he ought not to have the protection of this court.—Mr Sheriff, you may release the prisoner.'
Like the sailor who objected to his captain preaching and flogging too, offenders generally do not appreciate being suitably admonished as well as punished; and no doubt the Californian felt annoyed when, through incautiously demurring to the magistrate reproaching him with having no ambition, he found himself put to the question with: 'Where is it, sir? Where is it? Did you ever hear of Cicero taking free lunches? Did you ever hear that Plato gamboled through the alleys of Athens? Did you ever hear Demosthenes accused of sleeping under a coal-shed? If you would be a Plato, there would be a fire in your eye; your hair would have an intellectual cut; you'd step into a clean shirt; and you'd hire a mowing-machine to pare those finger-nails. You have got to go up for four months!'
The Honourable Kiah Rodgers, commonly called Old Kye, presiding in a Louisiana court, thus spoke his mind to a delinquent named Kettles: 'Prisoner, stand up! Mr Kettles, this court is under the painful necessity of passing sentence of the law upon you. This court has no doubt, Mr Kettles, but what you were brought into this scrape by the use of intoxicating liquors. The friends of this court all know that if there is any vice this court abhors it is intoxication. When this court was a young man, Mr Kettles, it was considerably inclined to drink, and the friends of this court know that this court has naterally a very high temper; and if this court had not stopped short off, I have no doubt, sir, but what this court, sir, would have been in the Penitentiary or in its grave.'
Still more communicative was Judge Kye respecting his young days when summing up in an action brought by an overseer for wrongful dismissal from his situation.
'The jury,' said his Honour, 'will take notice that this court is well acquainted with the nature of the case. When this court first started in the world it followed the business of overseering, and if there is any business which this court understands, it's hosses, mules, and niggers; though this court never overseed in its life for less than eight hundred dollars. And this court in hoss-racing was always naterally gifted; and this court in running a quarter race whar the hosses was turned, could allers turn a hoss so as to gain fifteen feet in a race; and on a certain occasion it was one of the conditions of the race that Kye Rodgers shouldn't turn narry of the hosses.' Surely it must have been Old Kye who upon taking his official seat for the first time, said: 'If this court know her duty, and she thinks she do, Justice will walk over this track with her head and tail up.'
Prone as he might be to discursiveness, we fancy the Louisiana judge would have laid down the law a little more lucidly than the worthy to whom a Minnesota juryman appealed for aid, when his ideas as to what constituted murder had been confused by the arguments of counsel.
'Gentlemen of the jury,' said this legal luminary, 'murder is where a man is murderously killed. The killer in such a case is a murderer. Now murder by poison is just as much murder as murder with a gun, pistol, or knife. It is the simple act of murdering that constitutes murder in the eye of the law. Don't let the ideas of murder and manslaughter confound you. Murder is one thing, manslaughter is quite another. Consequently, if there has been a murder, and it is not manslaughter, then it must be murder. Don't let this point escape you. Self-murder has nothing to do with this case. According to Blackstone and all the best living writers, one man cannot commit felo de se upon another; and that is clearly my view. Gentlemen, murder is murder. The murder of a brother is called fratricide; the murder of a father is called parricide, but that don't enter into this case. This case is murder, and as I said before, murder is most emphatically murder. You will take the case, gentlemen, and make up your minds according to the law and the evidence, not forgetting the explanation I have given you.'