"But such are _not_ the facts of this case; and when you find, as was the fact here, that on March 30 a sack appears in a particular place, marked with the prosecutor's initials, safe in his house at night, where it ought to have been but was not, on the morning of the 31st; and when you find that on that morning a sack of peas of precisely similar character was in the house of the prisoner in a precisely similar sack behind the door, the question very naturally arises, _How came_ those peas in that man's house? He says he found them; do you believe him? Did it ever occur to you, gentlemen, to find a similar sack of peas in the dead of the night on any road on which you chanced to be travelling? "The prosecutor says the prisoner stole them, and that is the question I ask you to answer. Did he or not, in your opinion, steal them?" I need not say what the verdict was. The man was _put back for sentence_. That is the point I am upon. On the following morning the Lord Chief Justice, still a bit angry with the prisoner's counsel for the miserable imposture he had attempted upon the jury, said,-- "God forbid, prisoner at the bar, that the defence attempted by your counsel yesterday should aggravate the punishment which I am about to inflict upon you; and with a view to dispel from my mind all that was then urged on your behalf, I have taken the night to consider what sentence I ought to pronounce." Having said thus much about the speech for the defence, he gave a very moderate sentence of two or three months' imprisonment. Every sentence that this Chief Justice passed had been well thought out and considered, and was the result of anxious deliberation--that is to say, in the serious cases that demanded it. Of course, I do not claim for my adopted system an infallibility which belongs to no human device, but only that during some years, by patiently following it, I was enabled the better to determine how I could combine justice with leniency. CHAPTER XLV. HOW I CROSS-EXAMINED PRINCE LOUIS NAPOLEON. I have been often questioned in an indirect manner as to the amount of my income and the number of my briefs. I do not mean by the Income Tax Commissioners, but by private "authorities." I was often _told_ how much I must be making. Sometimes it was said, "Oh, the Associates' Office verdict books show this and that." "Why, Hawkins, you must be making thirty thousand a year if you are making a penny. What a hard-working man you are! How _do_ you manage to get through it?"