"Is not that a touching memorial, gentlemen, of the workings of natural feeling in the heart of a misguided boy? He had left his father, left his home, left his friends in a fit of reckless folly, but when he meets with the name of the parent from whom he is estranged, in an American paper, in a distant land, he cuts the paragraph from the sheet, and it is carefully preserved among his precious things, during many succeeding years of hardships, and of wrongs. But there is another striking fact connected with that scrap of paper; the individual whose name stands there, as connected in the closest of human ties with the young man's father, is the same, whose legal representative I now see before me, prepared to oppose, by every means in his power, the claim of the son to the inheritance bequeathed him, with the forgiveness of his dying father. The simplest language I can choose, will best express the force of facts so painful. The circumstances are before you; it rests with you to say, whether tardy justice shall not at length make some amends for the wrongs of the last eighteen years." The defendants here asked to look at the paper; they could find no fault with it; in texture, colour, accuracy, every point, it corresponded with what it should be. Mr. Reed paused an instant, and then continued. "But, gentlemen of the jury, this old and well-worn pocket-book, the companion of my client's wanderings, and hard fortunes; the letter from the father to the son, received as authentic, without an instant's hesitation, by the defendants themselves; the marriage notice of the deceased father and the step-mother, now his legal opponent, are not the only proofs to be drawn from this portion of our testimony." Mr. Reed then opened the pocket-book, and showed that it had originally contained a number of leaves of blank paper; these leaves were partially covered with the hand-writing of William Stanley. The date of his going to sea, and the names of the vessels he had sailed in, were recorded. Brief, random notes occurred, of no other importance than that of proving the authenticity of the pocket-book. A sailor's song was written on one page; another was half-covered with figures, apparently some trifling accounts of his own. The date of a particular storm of unusual severity, was put down, with the latitude and longitude in which it occurred, the number of hours it lasted, and the details of the injury done to the vessel. This rude journal, if such it may be called, was handed to the jury, and also examined by the defendants.