I will give here also next an account of the most important criminal case I ever defended. A man by the name of Yard had shot and killed a party by the name of Jones. He claimed that he pointed a shotgun over the shoulder of his wife at the time Jones was approaching his wife about to commit an assault upon her for an illegal purpose, when he fired the gun and Jones fell dead as a result. Jones had come onto the premises where Yard and his wife resided, having in each hand a bucket with which he was supposed to be intending to go to a well for water. The buckets were found some distance, probably twenty-five or thirty steps from the door, and the prosecution claimed that the buckets indicated the place at which the deceased was at the time he was fired upon and killed. Yard and his wife were both in jail at the time I was sent for, and the first thing I did was to enjoin upon them the necessity of absolute silence and refusal to answer any questions or to communicate with any party or parties who might possibly thereafter testify against them. Upon a preliminary trial before the justice I waived an examination of the case and had the defendants enter bail for their appearance at court. A man by the name of Smith, who was the owner of the gun with which the deceased was shot and who had loaned it to Yard only a few days before, was indicted with Yard and his wife as accessory to the crime. As the defense in this case would depend entirely upon the testimony of Yard and his wife I at once appreciated the absolute importance of having these parties tell the exact truth without equivocation or invention. My experience as a lawyer had taught me that persons deeply interested in the result of the trial, participating in a transaction such as the killing of another, are subject to such a state of nervous excitement that they frequently do not remember with any degree of accuracy the collateral facts and circumstances attending the more important events, and persons of ordinary intellect imagine it is important that they should be able to recollect and answer accurately every question that is made in regard to the collateral facts and circumstances attending the principal event, and almost invariably they invent answers to such questions and pretend to know what really they do not know and do not recollect. The result is that they involve themselves in contradictions and impossibilities, and let confusion destroy even the reliable and truthful parts of their evidence, and this was what I feared in this case. I was accused by some members of the bar and outsiders of training these parties as witnesses in their own behalf, and in one sense of the word it was true, but I only trained them to tell the truth, carefully eliminating from their story and had them eliminate everything that I was satisfied upon thorough examination was the result of their invention instead of their recollection. I first