Page:The Berkeleys and their neighbors.djvu/97

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state. Pembroke went to Cave despondent and nervous about this.

"It is the best thing in the world for you," answered Cave. "Don't you see, the prosecution has taken the form of a persecution? And the bringing in of outside talent is the greatest luck I ever heard of. The jury, if I know anything of human nature, will not try the prisoner according to the law and the evidence. They will try you and the lawyers from elsewhere—with a strong pre-*disposition in favor of their own county man. It will go hard with them if they can't find some way to discount the outsiders. Of course, I don't say that this feeling will be immediately developed, but it will come out just as certainly as arithmetical progression."

"I hope so," Pembroke answered devoutly.

The day of the trial came—a sunshiny one in midwinter. Every man in the county turned out. Nothing delights a rural Virginian so much as a forensic argument. He will ride twenty miles to hear it, and sit it out, in cold, or heat, or wet, or misery, or anything. Then, besides the interest naturally attaching to the case, was the curiosity to see and hear Pembroke. He had not added to his popularity by his absence after the war—and Madame Koller had been a millstone around his neck latterly. His father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather had been great lawyers before him—indeed there was no tradition or history which went back to the time when there had not