The usual country town cases: Matthew Tomlin had been drunk and riotous again; James Jellicoe had been trespassing in search of rabbits; Martha Madden had assaulted Elizabeth Snowshall, and had said, so it was sifted out after a great deal of volubility, that she would "do for her"--what she would do for her not stated; a diminutive being, a stranger, who gave his name as Simpkins, had torn up his clothes at the workhouse, and now appeared, to the great delight of the spectators, in a peculiar costume much resembling a sack; another assault case arising out of the fact that Mrs Stocktle had "called" Mrs Stivvison,--spelt Stockton and Stevenson,--with the result that their lawful protectors had been dragged into the quarrel, and "Jack Stivvison had `leathered' Jem Stocktle." Upon these urgent cases the bench of magistrates, consisting of the Rev Eli Mallow, chairman, the Rev Arthur Smith, Sir Joshua St. Henry, and the Revds Thomas Hampson, James Lawrence Barton, and Onesimus Leytonsby, solemnly adjudicated. Then came the important case of the day; two men, who gave the names of Robert Thorns and Jock Morrison, were placed at the table. The first was a miserable, dirty-looking object, who seemed to have made a vow somewhere or another never to wash, shave, or sleep in anything but hay and straw, some of which was sticking still in his tangled hair; the other was a different breed of rough. Rough, certainly, a spectator who had judged the two idlers would have said; but he was decidedly a country rough, and did not belong to town. His big, burly look and length of limb indicated a man of giant strength; at least six feet high, his chest was deep and broad, and in his brown, half gipsy-looking face, liberally clothed with the darkest of dark-brown beards, there shone a pair of fierce dark eyes. Scraped and sand-papered down, and clothed in brown velveteen, with cord trousers and brown leather gaiters, he would have made a gamekeeper of whose appearance any country magnate might have been proud. As it was, his appearance before the country bench of magistrates was enough to condemn him for poaching. There was something of the keeper, too, in his appearance, for he had on a well-worn velveteen coat and low soft hat, but his big, soft hands told the tale of what he was--a ne'er-do-well, who looked upon life as a career in which no man was bound to work. Such was Jock Morrison. The case was plain against them, and they knew that they would have to suffer, for Jock was pretty well known for these affairs. Upon former occasions his brother Tom, the wheelwright, had paid guineas to Mr Ridley, the Lawford attorney, to defend him, but there were bounds to brotherly help. "I can't do it for ever," Tom Morrison had said to his young wife. "I've give Jock every chance I could; now he must take care of himself."