Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 06.pdf/264

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The Court of Appeals of Maryland. the war, and formed a partnership with Mr. John Thomson Mason of R. in 1872. In the following year he was trying a case at Elkridge Landing. He had finished his speech to the jury, and was sitting at the dinner table in the hotel, when he was stricken with apoplexy and became uncon scious. A few hours later he died, having never recovered the possession of his facul ties.

He married Miss Cowan Pitts. His wife and three children survive him One of his daughters married Lieutenant Commander Terry of the United States Navy, and another married Lieutenant Theodore Porter, a lieutenant in the same service, who died re cently. Judge Mason was fond of a joke, and never hesitated to tell one on himself. He used to narrate with great gusto a little incident in which he figured at a hotel in Hagerstown. It was here that the JOHN T. Judge came to the Bar, and it was only a short distance from " Montpelier," his father's estate and his birthplace. It hap pened that the Judge proposed to remain all night at the hotel on one occasion, and as he was sitting in the parlor he dropped a remark to the effect that his horse was showing some symptoms of lameness. A gentleman in the room at once spoke up, and announced that he was agent for an infallible "horse liniment," and insisted on the Judge's acceptance of a " sample-bottle" free of charge. This the Judge consented to receive, and shortly afterwards went to

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bed, putting his sample-bottle on the mantel piece in his room and thinking no more about it. During the night he was awakened by an intolerable pain in one of his legs. Now, the Judge had always had a great dread of paralysis, and when to the pain he found considerable stiffness added, he was seriously alarmed. He bethought him self of the bottle of " horse liniment" with which he had been presented during the evening, and made up his mind to try its efficacy on the afflicted limb. With some difficulty he made his way in the dark to the mantel piece, and felt around till he found the bot tle, and poured out a liberal quantity on his leg. rubbing it carefully over the skin. Then he went to bed. Although the liniment did not burn as he expected, the pain and stiffness soon afterwards sub sided, and the Judge slept tranquilly till MASON morning. He was horrified on waking to find that something very like mortification had set in, and his leg was of a deep bluishblack tinge. Hastily leaping up, and glad, though mystified, to find that notwithstand ing its alarming hue, the leg was still useful, he took down the offending bottle of lini ment, determined to throw all that was left of the contents into the fire. To his great surprise, it appeared that the bottle had never been uncorked. A glance at the other end of the mantel-piece explained the mys tery and the color of his leg. In his halfawake and altogether disturbed state of