When a lawsuit arises out of complicated family disputes, such as those concerned with inheritance and adoption, there are sometimes representatives of four generations in the court at the same time. Babes and small children, if their rights or interests are in any way involved, are brought into court by their mothers, not with any idea that the evidence of infants would be accepted, even if it could be intelligibly given, but merely in order that the magistrate may see that the children really exist and have not been invented for the occasion. Sometimes they appear in the court for the practical reason that all the adults of the family have come to prosecute their lawsuit and that no one is left at home to take care of them. The presence of young boys of twelve or fourteen is very useful, as they are often able to express themselves and even to state the material points of a case far more briefly and intelligibly than their garrulous elders. If the case is an important one the court is often filled by cousins and aunts and interested neighbours of the litigants, and these people are all ready to swear that plaintiff or defendant, as the case may be, is a man of pre-eminent virtue who has never committed a wrong action or entertained an unrighteous thought in his life, while his opponent is a noted scoundrel who is the terror and bully of the whole countryside. These exaggerations are merely resorted to as a method of emphasising one view of the matter in dispute, and are not, as a rule, seriously intended to mislead the magistrate so much as to give a gentle bias to his mind. If, as very frequently happens, the magistrate has occasion to ask a witness why he has made a number of obvious and unnecessary misstatements, he merely replies with childlike blandness: _Ta_ _jên mien-ch'ien hsiao-ti pu kan sa huang_--"In the Great Man's presence the Little One would not dare to tell a lie." When arguing out their cases in court litigants seldom lose their temper--always a sign of very "bad form" in China--but they often assail each other in very vigorous language. Men of some education often make a show of leaving it to the magistrate to unmask the evil nature of their opponent. "If the magistrate will only look at that man's face," they say, "he will see that the fellow is a rogue." The remark of course implies, and is intended to imply, that the magistrate is a man of consummate perspicacity who cannot be deceived.