‘Indeed,’ said the judge; ‘I should be glad to know how?’
‘Well, my lord, I will tell you,’ replied the witness. ‘A gentleman left a hundred and twenty pounds to the poor of our parish. We applied for it again and again; but it wouldn’t do: the executors, the lawyers, and one and another were glad to keep the money in their hands; for you know, my lord, it is an old saying, that might can overcome right. We did not know what to do. I came to your lordship—then Counsellor Murray—for advice, and you advised us to file a bill in Chancery. We did so; and after throwing a great deal of good money after bad, we got what they call a decree; and such a decree it was, that when all expenses were paid, I reckon we were about a hundred and seventy-five pounds out of pocket. Now, my lord, I leave you to judge whether the parish money was not worse employed when I was churchwarden than ever it was before.’ Lord Mansfield thought it might have been used to better profit.
When a man makes a formal contract he should be sure it is one the law will recognise. A would-be Benedict of Hancock, Ohio, offered fifty dollars reward to any one who would procure him ‘a wife.’ Sam Wickham introduced a bewitching widow, and the wedding soon came off. Then Wickham wanted the dollars; but the happy man would not pay. His plea perhaps was that he had got a widow and not a wife. Sam brought an action for the money, and lost it, and as he paid his lawyer’s bill, solemnly abjured the wife-procuring business henceforth for evermore.—A year or two ago, one Thomas Clegg sued Charles Derrick in the Rochdale county court upon the following bill of particulars: ‘For finding a husband valued at fifty pounds, commission five per cent. per annum; two pounds ten shillings.’ The plaintiff deposed that the wife of the defendant, when a single woman, contracted with him to get her a husband, saying, she was twenty-six, not married yet, and feared she never would be; and if he would get Derrick to marry her, she would pay him five per cent. upon fifty pounds a year. He brought the pair together, and considered that the husband was bound to fulfil the wife’s agreement. But Mr Clegg learned that a contract to procure marriage between two parties for reward was altogether illegal, and could not be sustained.
As regards matrimonial contracts, the sexes are assuredly not on an equality. When Miss Roxalana Hoonan sued Mr Earle for breach of promise in a Brooklyn court, she admitted the gentleman had never promised marriage by his hand or tongue, but he had kissed her in company; and Judge Neilson told the jury that no interchange of words was necessary, ‘the gleam of the eye and the conjunction of the lips being overtures when frequent and protracted;’ and thus directed, they made the defendant pay fifteen thousand dollars for heedlessly indulging in eye-gleams and lip-conjunctions.
Extreme explicitness would seem to be required when trafficking with Frenchmen. In 1870, a lady purchased two hundred pounds’ worth of jewellery in Paris, the jeweller giving her a written promise to exchange the articles if not approved. She wore them for half-a-dozen years, and then intimated to the astonished man her desire to change them for others of newer style. He naturally demurred, arguing, as his advocate urged before the civil tribunal, that it was unreasonable that he should be called upon to accept at the price originally paid for them, trinkets that had been used constantly for six years. The court nevertheless decided that the agreement did not define the period during which the exchange might be made, and he must do his customer’s bidding. This might be law; equity it certainly was not. As we write, a case of a very similar kind has just been decided in London against Mr Streeter, the well-known jeweller, who, having promised to take back a diamond ring if not approved of, was obliged to do so, though his customer had retained it for three years.
Sharp practice is not always so successful. A gentleman took railway tickets for himself, his servants, and his horses. After the passengers were seated, it was found expedient to divide the train, the gentleman being in the first part. When the second train was about to start, the cry was ‘Tickets, please.’ The servants having none, they and the horses were turned out of their places and left behind. The gentleman sued the Company. The latter brought forward their by-law setting forth that no passenger would be allowed to enter a carriage without having first obtained a ticket, to be produced on demand. The court very properly over-ruled the plea, deciding that by delivering the tickets to the master, and not to the servants severally, the Company had contracted with him personally, and could not justify their failure to carry out the contract they had made. This was perhaps just, but we should advise that in all such cases each passenger should have possession of his own ticket.
Hood once figured in a court of law as a defendant in an action for libel, the plaintiff being Sir John Carr, author of The Stranger in Ireland, The Stranger in France, and other tedious books of travel. Appended to the poet’s My Pocket-book, or Hints for a right merrie and conceited Tour, in Quarto, to be called the Stranger in Ireland in 1805, was a sketch entitled ‘The Knight leaving Ireland with regret.’ This was the libel, being, as Sir John or his legal aid put it, ‘a certain false, scandalous, malicious, ridiculous, and defamatory representation of the said Sir John Carr, in the form of a man of ludicrous and ridiculous appearance, holding a pocket-handkerchief to his face, and appearing to be weeping, and also containing therein a false, malicious, and ridiculous representation of a man of ridiculous and ludicrous appearance following the said representation of the said John Carr, and loaded with and bending under the weight of three large books, and a pocket-handkerchief appearing to be held in one of the hands of the representation of a man, and the corners thereof appearing to be tied together as if containing something therein, with the printed word wardrobe depending therefrom; thereby falsely and maliciously meaning and intending to represent, for the purpose of rendering the said Sir John Carr ridiculous, and exposing him to laughter, ridicule, and contempt, that one copy of the said first above-mentioned book, and two copies of the said secondly above-mentioned book, were so heavy as to cause a man to bend under the weight thereof, and that his the said Sir John Carr’s wardrobe was very small, and capable of being contained in a pocket-handkerchief.’ Spite of this precise specification of the offence committed by the pencil of the pun-loving poet, twelve good men and true failed to find that the traveller had been libelled, however much he might have been affronted.
A young man losing his wits through parental thwarting of his matrimonial aspirations, was placed in an asylum. Having occasion to leave his charge for a few minutes, the attendant forgot to lock the door upon him. The lunatic taking advantage of the oversight, slipped out of the room, made his way to an upper gallery, smashed the window, and leaped out a thirty feet fall. The shock restored his reason, but he was crippled for life; and his father brought an action against the superintendent of the asylum for compensation. The judge ruled that the superintendent could not be held guilty of neglect because his subordinate failed in his duty; and so saved the jury the trouble of assessing damages, which, supposing they set the benefit done to the patient’s mind against the injury done to his limbs, would have been a difficult matter for calculation.
Almost as difficult as that left to certain assessors appointed by the civil tribunal of Melun. The plaintiff in a case tried in that court alleged that M. de Sagonrac had ordered his gamekeeper to place snares near his land, in which ‘bats, owls and other night-birds’ were caught; in consequence of which mice and other vermin had so multiplied that his crops were spoiled. The tribunal holding that if the facts were so, the defendant would be liable, appointed three farmers to ascertain if any damage had been done to the plaintiff’s crops; whether that damage was due to animals whose presence on the land arose from the destruction of birds of prey by the defendant’s keeper; and if so, to assess the amount of the plaintiff’s loss.—A yet more puzzling suit is still at the time we write awaiting the decision of the American bench. A landslip in Shodack filled up a creek and turned the water in a different direction. The proprietor of a mill deprived of its motive-power, sues the farmer owning the land on which the slip occurred, not for damages, but to compel him to restore the stream to its former channel.