testimony; but he shook his head, and said simply he had nothing to say. More than once they consulted the oracle, but it remained d u m b . If it had spoken, and produced the " log-book," the chances were five hundred to one, that instead of a disagreement, there would have been a verdict for the defendant. Mr. Finn, however, was no private detective; what he k n e w in globo was known to others partially, and he left those individuals free to tender their evidence voluntarily, or the defendant's agents to find them out. H e was neither a profiter by, nor a contributor to, the Major's blackmailing, and washed his hands of the business. Besides, he was never amongst the Fawkner following, but very m u c h the other way, and therefore so far as he was concerned, the Fawknerites should fight it out without help from him, and if they failed, let their principal take the consequences. A n d such is the queer story of h o w the Major was muzzled, n o w told for thefirsttime. Mr. James Smith (of w h o m some amusing reminiscences are given in the chapter on Banking) was a plodding, painstaking, well-meaning magistrate; but so tedious in groping his way through any but the plainer cases, as to be almost intolerable. Sometimes he would be adjudicating singly in some petty Crown prosecution, with the Chief-Constable on one side, and an Attorney on the other, and to make confusion worse confounded the clerk (Belcher) would strike in as amicus curia;, when the verbiage would be so overwhelming as to addle the poor old gentleman. It was as if three small hoses of Y a n Yean water, slightly different in temperature, played in succession, and about every two minutes simultaneously, on his head. H e would stoop over a law-book, apparently so stunned as to be incapable of comprehending a fractional part of what was said, and slowly raising his head would look bewilderingly about him and decide as well as he was able. H e was known by the alias of " J i m m y Whistle." At times he would snarl at the newspaper representatives, and once refused permission to the editors to sit at the Solicitors' table (a courtesy usually conceded) for which he got paid off in a style that caused him to relent. There was one prominent m e m b e r of the reporting staff, M r . John Curtis, the deftest hand at inditing exaggerated paragraphs that ever troubled a compositor. His style was of the paraphrastic, piling u p half-a-dozen small fictions on an atom of fact, and in police reporting, "Jack," as he was called, was unequalled in his line. " J i m m y " Smith couldn't bear him, and Mr. William Hull abhorred him. "Jack " liked to pitch into the magistrates whether they deserved it or not. H e came after the Major's time, and was, therefore, never ordered to the lock-up; but he was often turned out of the reporters' box, and had to take notes on his hat in the crowd of unwashed outside the barrier. If a magistrate was five minutes late, Curtis would write him down as an hour and a-half behind his time, and he annoyed their worships very m u c h by so doing. "THE EVIL EYE."
One day the Rev. Irving Hetherington, a well-known and respected Presbyterian minister, came into Court to speak on some pressing business with Mr. Hull, w h o was on the Bench. They had a couple of minutes' conversation, and Mr. Hetherington departed. In the next issue of the Daily News (Jack Curtis' paper), appeared a third of a column of a most spitefully written, though florid notice, in which Mr. Hull was "roasted" for wasting a couple of hours of the public time, in a confab with a black-coated, whitechokered expiree from V a n Diemen's Land. Hull read the paragraph, and bottled up his wrath carefully until the following Wednesday, the day he was rostered to officiate, when he m a d e his appearance, uncorked the bottle, and gave poor Curtis the full measure of it. H e denounced him as everything that was unbecoming a gentleman of the Press, winding up with what he thought would be a stunning clincher, by proclaiming Curtis to be a writer of fables, the humour of which so tickled " Jack," that he laughed uproariously, and a policeman was ordered to remove him from the box, which was done, and the offender ook his stand in the body of the Court. Mr. Hull warned him, on pain of committal to prison, never, on a Wednesday, to dare to enter the reporters' box, and so every other day Curtis used to appear in the prescribed place, but on Wednesdays he appeared amongst the ignobile valgus, in a particular spot that would bring him vis-a-vis with the irate Magistrate, at w h o m he stared as if resolved upon looking him down. Mr. Hull was ever on the most friendly terms with the Mr. Finn before mentioned, and between them there subsisted a mutual esteem, only broken by Mr. Hull's death. In a conversation one day the subject of Curtis' perpetually eye-focussing Hull was mentioned, and Finn told the Magistrate, with a view to
