“Right you are, Cole. You’re a little prig sometimes, but you are something of a man, sir--something of a man!” Mr. Cole blushed with pleasure at this dubious compliment. Olivia Berkeley’s heart was touched with pity for the unfortunate negro. His ailing wife came every day to tell the same rambling and piteous story. Besides, Cave had been at work with her--and he had great power with young imaginations. Pembroke felt a certain anxiety about the case. It was one of those which gave room for the sympathetic oratory which in the country districts in the South yet obtains. He felt at first that if he could make the jury weep, his success as a lawyer would be assured and immediate. But if he failed it would mean long years of toil at his profession to gain that which by a happy inspiration he could win at a single _coup_. He worked hard, and prepared himself--not solely for oratory, because the Hibbses had not only engaged a formidable array of local talent, but had got one, if not two great men from afar, and the attorney-general himself, to help the state. Pembroke went to Cave despondent and nervous about this. “It is the best thing in the world for you,” answered Cave. “Don’t you see, the prosecution has taken the form of a persecution? And the bringing in of outside talent is the greatest luck I ever heard of. The jury, if I know anything of human nature, will not try the prisoner according to the law and the evidence. They will try you and the lawyers from elsewhere--with a strong predisposition in favor of their own county man. It will go hard with them if they can’t find some way to discount the outsiders. Of course, I don’t say that this feeling will be immediately developed, but it will come out just as certainly as arithmetical progression.” “I hope so,” Pembroke answered devoutly. The day of the trial came--a sunshiny one in midwinter. Every man in the county turned out. Nothing delights a rural Virginian so much as a forensic argument. He will ride twenty miles to hear it, and sit it out, in cold, or heat, or wet, or misery, or anything. Then, besides the interest naturally attaching to the case, was the curiosity to see and hear Pembroke. He had not added to his popularity by his absence after the war--and Madame Koller had been a millstone around his neck latterly. His father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather had been great lawyers before him--indeed there was no tradition or history which went back to the time when there had not been a Pembroke practicing successfully at the bar in the county. So while there was a current of disapproval against him, there was a strong undercurrent of local sympathy in his favor also. Pembroke appeared early on the ground that morning, with Miles. It was his first opportunity except at the Campdown races to meet the county people of all classes generally. He went about among them cool, affable, and smiling.