The witness stepped down, and genteelly resumed her place near the plaintiff. Neither of the ladies changed countenance, or seemed in any wise aware that the testimony just given had been detrimental to the plaintiff’s cause. They talked pleasantly together, and were presently alike interested in the testimony of a witness to the defendant’s good character. He testified that the defendant was a notoriously peaceable person, who was in some sort of scientific employment, but where or what I could not make out; he was a college graduate, and it was quite unimaginable to the witness that he should be the object of this sort of charge. When the witness stood aside, the defendant was allowed to testify in his own behalf, which he did with great energy. He provided himself with a chair, and when he came to the question of the assault he dramatized the scene with appropriate action. He described with vividness the relative positions of himself and the cook when, on the day given, he went into the kitchen to see if the landlady were there, and was ordered out by her. “She didn’t give me time to go, but caught up a chair, and came at me, thus!” Here he represented with the chair in his hand an assault that made the reporters, who sat near him, quail before the violence of the mere dumb-show. “I caught the rung of the chair in my hand, thus, and instinctively pushed it, thus. I suppose,” he added, in diction of memorable elegance, “that the impact of the chair in falling back against her wrist may have produced the contusions of which she complains.” The judge and the bar smiled; the audience, not understanding, looked serious. “And what,” said the judge, “about throwing the pitcher at her?” “I never saw the pitcher, your honor, till I saw it in court. I threw no pitcher at her, but retreated from the kitchen as quickly as possible.” “That will do,” said the judge. The plaintiff’s counsel did the best that could be done for no case at all in a brief argument. The judge heard him patiently, and then quietly remarked, “The charge is dismissed. The defendant is discharged. Call the next case.” The plaintiff had probably imagined that the affair was going in her favor. She evidently required the explanation of her counsel that it had gone against her, and all was over; for she looked at the judge in some surprise, before she turned and walked out of the court-room with quiet dignity, still caressing her pitcher, and amicably accompanied by the other lady, her damaging witness. V.