And the pros and cons of any _cause celebre_ are discussed wherever men foregather long before the fierce light of the Courts beat upon the matter. The "company" of the village public constitute themselves into an informal jury. Generally each side has its adherents. The witnesses, or such of them as frequent the houses of entertainment, tell and tell again the story they are to repeat in Court. The strong and the weak points of the evidence are discussed, criticized, cross-examined, as it were, with all the acumen of the native mind, and all the freedom of irresponsibility, and of the license that ignores the trammelling confines of the laws of evidence. The peculiar qualifications of the local lawyers engaged are discussed with a particularity that would very much surprise, and not always gratify the gentlemen whose merits and demerits are so freely appraised. Illustrations drawn from previous forensic contests are liberally drawn upon. There is generally in the company some man who has purchased by bitter experience the right to speak with authority, who airs his knowledge of the intricate mazes of legal proceedings. His conversation bristles with technical terms. He speaks glibly of writs, summonses, subpoenas, judgments, appeals, bills of costs and the taxation thereof. If by good fortune he possesses a copy of an ancient text-book and can produce text and verse in support of his assertions he is an opponent to be admired, but shunned. In public-house controversy the man who is most dogmatic, who can shout loudest and longest is usually adjudged the victor, especially if he is prepared to back his opinion and table the money; but even he must yield to the visible _dicta_ of the printed word. By the time the cause is ripe for hearing, bets have been made and taken; the adherents of the adversaries have ranged themselves; there are the village Montagues and Capulets, and the local attorney goes into Court the champion of a score of clients whose very existence he is unaware of. Now in Holmfirth Jabez Tinker's defeat had been celebrated at the _Cropper's Arms_ by a beast-heart supper. The landlord had provided the beast-heart in the due recognition of the policy of throwing a sprat to catch a mackerel. There had been some talk of inviting Edwin Sykes to preside at the supper, but even Holmfirth hardihood has its bounds. Tom Pinder, the landlord had shrewdly surmised, would prove a kill-joy, and as for Ben Garside, though every feeling of his heart said "yes" to the invitation, he was kept away partly by his own sense of propriety, but still more by the emphatic injunctions of his better half.