On taking his seat, he was vaguely conscious of a bank of faces, tier above tier, at the back of the courtroom. Before him some fifteen or twenty officials, reporters, and lawyers lolled at their tables, walked about, yawned, picked their teeth, or told anecdotes that raised a smothered laugh. Most of them struck him as untidily dressed; few looked intelligent. Among them a portly man, whom he afterward saw as the district attorney, in a cutaway coat, with a line of piqué at the opening of his waistcoat, seemed like a person in fancy costume. Everyone paused as he entered the cage, but, a glance having satisfied their curiosity, they paid him no further attention. The trial lasted three days, passing before his eyes like a motion-picture film of which he was only a spectator. Try as he would, he found it hard to believe that the proceedings had anything to do with him. "All this fuss," he would comment to himself, grimly, "to get the right to kill a man." The strain of being under so many cruel or indifferent eyes sent him back with relief to his cell, where during the nights he slept soundly. His one bit of surprise came from Stenhouse’s final argument in his defense. Up to that point, both defense and prosecution had struck him as more or less silly. The state had tried to prove him a desperado whom it was dangerous to let live; the defense had done its best to show him a youth of arrested intelligence, not responsible for his acts. He grinned inwardly when Jennie, Gussie, and half a dozen of his old chums testified to foolish pranks, forgotten or half forgotten by himself, in the hope of convincing the court that he had never had the normal sense. But Stenhouse in his concluding speech transcended all that, taking Teddy’s own stand as the only one which offered the ghost of a chance of acquittal. He began his final appeal quietly, in a tone little more than colloquial. "There’s an old saying, a variant on something said by Benjamin Franklin, which we might remember oftener than we do. It’s terse, pithy, humorous, wise. Some one has called it the finest bit of free verse composed in the eighteenth century. Listen to it. ’_It is hard to make an empty sack stand upright._' So it is. The empty sack collapses of its own accord. It can’t do anything but collapse. It was not meant to stand upright. To demand that it shall stand upright is to insist on the impossible. A full sack will stand as solid as a tree. A group of full sacks will support one another. Put the empty sack among them and from the very law of gravitation it will go down helplessly. Now, gentlemen of the jury, you’re being asked to bring in a verdict against the empty sack—the sack that’s been carefully kept empty—because it hasn’t the strength and stability of that which all the coffers of the country have combined to fill."