“Nay, Herr Procurator,” interposed I, hastily. “I have the less claim to exact this sacrifice on your part, that even when you have rendered it, it will be all fruitless and unprofitable. I am just recovering from a severe illness. I am, as you have very acutely remarked, a man of very narrow and limited faculties in my best of moments, and I am now still lower in the scale of intelligence. Were you to read that lucid document till we were both gray-headed, it would leave me just as uninformed as to imputed crime as I now am.” “I perceive,” said he, gravely. Then, turning to his clerk, he bade him write down, “'And the so-called Harpar, having duly heard and with decorously-lent attention listened to the foregoing act, did thereupon enter his plea of mental incapacity and derangement.” “Nay, Herr Procurator, I would simply record that, however open to follow some plain narrative, the forms and subtleties of a legal document only bewilder me.” “What for an ingeniously-worded and with-artifice-cunningly-conceived excuse have we here?” exclaimed he, indignantly. “Is it from England, with her seventeen hundred and odd volumes of an incomplete code, that the Imperial and Royal Government is to learn legislation? You are charged with offences that are known to every state of civilization: highway assault and molestation; attack with arms and deadly implements, stimulated by base and long heretofore and with-bitterness-imagined plans of vengeance on your countryman and former associate, the so-named Rigges. From him, too, proceeds the information as to your political character, and the ever-to-be deplored and only-with-blood-expiated error of republicanism by which you are actuated. This brief, but not-the-less-on-that-account lucid exposition, it is my duty first to read out, and then leave with you. With all your from-a-wrong- impulse-proceeding and a-spirit-of-opposition-suggested objections, I have no wish nor duty to meddle. The benign and ever paternal rule under which we live gives even to the most-with-accusation-surrounded, and with-strong-presumption-implicated prisoner, every facility of defence. Having read and matured this indictment, you will, after a week, make choice of an advocate.” “Am I to be confronted with my accuser?” “I sincerely hope that the indecent spectacle of insulting attack and offensive rejoinder thus suggested is unknown to the administration of our law.” “How, then, can you be certain that I am the man he accuses of having molested him?” “You are not here to assail, nor I to defend, the with-ages-consolidated and by-much-tact-accumulated wisdom of our Imperial and Royal Code.” “Might he not say, when he saw me, 'I never set eyes on this man before'?” He turned again to his clerk, and dictated something of which I could but catch the concluding words, “And thereby imputing perjury to the so-called Rigges.”