'I tell you there's nothing going on. Every one is breathing and baiting.' And he got him safe to a pastrycook's, and administered brandy cherries, which Aubrey bolted whole like pills, only entreating to return, and wanting to know how he thought the case going. 'Excellently. Hazlitt's evidence and yours ought to carry him through. And Anderson says they have made so much out of the witnesses for the prosecution, that they need call none for the defence; and so the enemy will be balked of their reply, and we shall have the last word. I vow I have missed my vocation. I know I was born for a barrister!' 'Now may we come back?' said the boy, overwhelmed by his brother's cheeriness; and they squeezed into court again, Tom inserting Aubrey into his own former seat, and standing behind him on half a foot at the angle of the passage. They were in time for the opening of the defence, and to hear Leonard described as a youth of spirit and promise, of a disposition that had won him general affection and esteem, and recommended to universal sympathy by the bereavement which was recent in the memory of his fellow-townsmen; and there was a glance at the mourning which the boy still wore. 'They had heard indeed that he was quick-tempered and impulsive; but the gentlemen of the jury were some of them fathers, and he put it to them whether a ready and generous spirit of indignation in a lad were compatible with cowardly designs against helpless old age; whether one whose recreations were natural science and manly exercise, showed tokens of vicious tendencies; above all, whether a youth, whose friendship they had seen so touchingly claimed by a son of one of the most highly respected gentlemen in the county, were evincing the propensities that lead to the perpetration of deeds of darkness.' Tom patted Aubrey on the shoulder; and Aubrey, though muttering 'humbug,' was by some degrees less wretched. 'Men did not change their nature on a sudden,' the counsel continued; 'and where was the probability that a youth of character entirely unblemished, and of a disposition particularly humane and generous, should at once rush into a crime of the deep and deadly description, to which a long course of dissipation, leading to perplexity, distress, and despair, would be the only inducement?'