“I know that as well as the best lawyer in Duke’s; but _character_ can tell ag’in an accused, as is very likely to be shown in the Oyer and Tarminer of this day. Character counts, let me tell you, when the facts get a little confused; and this is just what I was about to say. Mary Monson has money; where does it come from?” “Those that think her guilty say that it comes from poor Mrs. Goodwin’s stockin’,” returned Hicks, with a laugh; “but, for my part, I’ve _seen_ that stockin’, and am satisfied it didn’t hold five hundred dollars, if it did four.” Here the reporter out with his notes, scribbling away for some time. That evening a paragraph, a little altered to give it point and interest, appeared in an evening paper, in which the conflicting statements of Tongue and Hicks were so presented, that neither of these worthies could have recognised his own child. That paper was in Biberry next morning, and had no inconsiderable influence, ultimately, on the fortunes of the accused. In the bar-room of Mrs. Horton, the discussion was also lively and wily on this same subject. As this was a place much frequented by the jurors, the agents of Timms and Williams were very numerous in and around that house. The reader is not to suppose that these men admitted directly to themselves even, the true character of the rascally business in which they were engaged; for their employers were much too shrewd not to cover, to a certain degree, the deformity of their own acts. One set had been told that they were favouring justice, bringing down aristocratic pride to the level of the rights of the mass, demonstrating that this was a free country, by one of the very vilest procedures that ever polluted the fountains of justice at their very source. On the other hand, the agents of Timms had been persuaded that they were working in behalf of a persecuted and injured woman, who was pressed upon by the well-known avarice of the nephew of the Goodwins, and who was in danger of becoming the victim of a chain of extraordinary occurrences that had thrown her into the meshes of the law. It is true, this reasoning was backed by liberal gifts; which, however, were made to assume the aspect of compensation fairly earned; for the biggest villain going derives a certain degree of satisfaction in persuading himself that he is acting under the influence of motives to which he is, in truth, a stranger. The homage which vice pays to virtue is on a much more extended scale than is commonly supposed.