and informed him that the Countess de Saldar urgently entreated him to come to the house without delay. He also wished to speak a few words to her, and stepped forward briskly. He had no prophetic intimations of the change this interview would bring upon him.
ASSIZE INTELLIGENCE—VERY ORDINARY.
BY ALBANY FONBLANQUE, JUN.
CHAPTER I.
“Really, really, my lud,” expostulated the counsel for the prosecution, dropping his brief, and lowering his eye-glass, “there is so much noise, that I can hardly hear my own voice.”
“Chut! chut! chut! Si—lence!” exclaimed the Crier of the Court.
“If pipple want to talk, they’d better do ut outside,” observed one of the most good-natured and sensible of judges.
“It’s them ladies in the pink bonnets,” whispered the foreman of the jury to his next neighbour.
“Go on,” said the judge; and the trial, momentarily suspended by the reprobated twittering of idle spectators, was resumed.
Reader! listen unto the voice of wisdom, unto the words of Charlie Davis: “If ever you or your friends create a disturbance in a court of justice, or in church, or in a theatre, or concert room, or any other public place, and unpleasant observations are made thereon, turn round and stare angrily at some one immediately behind you. This will prevent you looking conscious under any reproof that may be administered to wrong-doers in general, and will divert attention from the real offender.” Charlie pursued these tactics upon the occasion above recorded with eminent success. The real culprits were the pink bonnets and their brother; but he rose and cast a glance of withering indignation at an elderly clergyman, who was seated immediately behind them, and whom the cry of “Si—lence!” had awakened from a sound sleep. All eyes were immediately turned upon the victim; and official heads were shaken reprovingly in his direction, to his intense discomfiture. Poor man! he knew that he had slept, and concluding, no doubt, that he had been snoring, accepted the popular reprobation with meekness, and soon afterwards sidled out of court.
Now the Wardleurs had always been very civil to Charlie when he came to Minsterton—the grand old city where, as everybody knows, the assizes for Sharpshire are held. Mr. W. was a county magistrate, and on the grand jury; but his daughters, the owners of the pink bonnets, indicated by the sharp-eyed juryman (what right had he—by-the-bye—to be staring at them, instead of attending to the evidence?), had never seen the inside of a court of justice, although they had lived all their lives in a circuit town. They could go at any time, and therefore never went at all; on the same principle that Londoners never visit St. Paul’s, or the Thames Tunnel, or the India House, or other semi-gratuitous exhibitions, to which their country cousins rush with such avidity, and “do” with so much resignation. So one morning Charlie volunteered to find the girls and their brother Jack (at home on leave from her Majesty’s Coke and Scuttle Office) good places to hear an interesting trial that was coming on the next day, if Mr. Wardleur would bring them with him in the morning. No sooner had they settled down into their seats, than they opened a fire of questions as to what was the meaning of this, that, and the other; Charlie’s answers to which, and a sudden exclamation from Jack Wardleur, brought down upon them (or rather their venerable scapegoat) the storm of expostulation with which this article commences. As soon as business was resumed, Davis handed the girls a slip of paper, on which he had written, “Watch, and listen; and I will endeavour to explain everything when we get home.” So they were as mute as mice during the remainder of their stay in court.
Now Grace and Mabel Wardleur were clever enough to know that they understood very little about what they saw and heard in Court that day, and were sufficiently well educated to be aware that there is no disgrace in asking for information. Jack’s “schooling” had cost his father considerably more than a thousand pounds, and the least that is said just at present respecting his college expenses will probably be the soonest mended. The subject is a sore one at Wardleur Chace. My young friend, however, passed a most satisfactory examination for the Government clerkship that he holds, having specially distinguished himself by his answer to the question, “What was the origin and practice of the Roman Bath?” together with his paper in reply to the demand, “State some of the principal Politico-Economic questions involved in the prosecution of the Second Punic War,” propounded by the Civil Service Examiners to test Jack’s fitness to copy letters (at a salary of ninety pounds a-year) in the “Coke and Scuttle Office,” relating to the coaling of Her Majesty’s ships of war. Still, I have found that his information about very ordinary things that were going on under his nose every day of his life was anything but extensive. “You see, old fellow,” he would say, “I’m pretty well posted up about the Greeks and Romans, and all that, you know; but we did not grind up these other sort of things at college, and, hang me, if I can make head or tail of them.”
I do not think that Jack and his sisters are the only people who have attended the assizes, now proceeding, and been unable to understand the proceedings they heard and saw—so why should I not make public the account that Charlie Davis gave of our criminal procedure in reply to the demands of his fair hostesses and their brother Jack.
“Well, where shall I begin?” asked Charlie, when he had rejoined the ladies after dinner.
“Begin at the beginning,” said Mabel Wardleur, taking up her work.
“But suppose I worry you with a lot of things you don’t want to be told?” objected Charlie.
“You can’t guess what we do not know unless we tell you what we do know,” said Grace, “and as we are not going to give you that information begin at the beginning, sir, as you were told.”
