“My client, the only daughter of a widowed mother—who has for
years stemmed the varying tides of adversity—in the western
precincts of this town—stands before you to-day invested only in
her own innocence. She wears no—er—rich gifts of her faithless
admirer—is panoplied in no jewels, rings, nor mementoes of
affection such as lovers delight to hang upon the shrine of their
affections; hers is not the glory with which Solomon decorated
the Queen of Sheba, though the defendant, as I shall show later,
clothed her in the less expensive flowers of the king’s poetry.
No! gentlemen! The defendant exhibited in this affair a certain
frugality of—er—pecuniary investment, which I am willing to admit
may be commendable in his class. His only gift was characteristic
alike of his methods and his economy. There is, I understand, a
certain not unimportant feature of religious exercise known as
‘taking a collection.’ The defendant, on this occasion, by the
mute presentation of a tip plate covered with baize, solicited
the pecuniary contributions of the faithful. On approaching the
plaintiff, however, he himself slipped a love-token upon the
plate and pushed it towards her. That love-token was a lozenge—a
small disk, I have reason to believe, concocted of peppermint
and sugar, bearing upon its reverse surface the simple words,
‘I love you!’ I have since ascertained that these disks may be
bought for five cents a dozen—or at considerably less than one
half-cent for the single lozenge. Yes, gentlemen, the words ‘I love
you!‘—the oldest legend of all; the refrain, ‘when the morning
stars sang together’—were presented to the plaintiff by a medium so
insignificant that there is, happily, no coin in the republic low
enough to represent its value.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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