Country life -- Fiction; Farm life -- Fiction; Outdoor life -- Fiction; Rural conditions -- Fiction
The crowd of spectators was large, and the interest felt by all, at
least, curious and wakeful. Squire Fabens took his magisterial seat
with an air of unaffected gravity, glanced around the assembly with a
mild, intelligent eye, and presented before them a noble form and
reverend mien, which inspired the virtuous, with new admiration for
goodness, and filled the vicious with secret remorse and apparent shame
for the evil of their doings.
Cicero Bray, Esq., appeared as counsel for the plaintiff, and C. Fox
Faddle, Esq., was counsel for the prisoner.
Lawyer Bray was a mountainous man, about thirty-five years old; and he
had impudence ingrained with his brawny meat and muscles, and his
tongue, let loose, would run like a mill-stream. His head rose a
little above his ears, and was huge of girth in a horizontal measure.
His hair was a sort of wolf's gray, was clipped all over within an inch
of his head, and stood up like the bristles on a wild boar's back. His
brows were bushy, and jutted, roof-like, over his deeply-sunken eyes;
his nose was bluff as a bull-dog's; his cheek-bones were rough and
high; his eyes were wide-set; his mouth was cut square across almost
from ear to ear; his chin was square and massy; he had an Adam's apple
as large as a gilly-flower ripening on his throat; his hands were large
and bony, and his voice "grated harsh thunder," as Milton said of the
gates of hell.
Lawyer Bray was prompt and saucy in court, and often won his case in
other towns by the thunder of his voice and the force of his action
while on the floor. He could always read an abundance of law to
sustain any point he argued, although the law quoted might not be found
written in the book. He was a capital shot, and kept a pair of the
fleetest hounds, and often hauled in his shingle and hunted week in and
week out, leaving business to follow suit. He made light of religious
and sacred things; he could curse the sky when it thundered, and swear
the lights blue with the boldest voluble tongue; and yet he would
appeal to God to judge him in a plea, and silence, and exclude a
witness for any unpopular religious belief. He rose to an extensive
business in the towns about, at last; and is quoted at this day, for
some wild gale of a speech, or some saucy joke, or strange adventure.
Lawyer Faddle was equally original. He was as tall as Bray, whenever
he straightened up in an animated speech; but his long form commonly
bent over, and described a segment of a rainbow. His head was small,
and his hair long and thin, and light and shiny as flax; his eyes were
almost white, and were set obliquely; his nose was long, aquiline, and
pinched together in the nostrils; his teeth were long and broad, and
those above shut over upon his lower lip and kept it in a constant
chafe. His voice was clear enough, and it never failed in a speech;
but it seemed to reside in his little thirsty throat, and it piped like
a killdeer's in its proudest swell.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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