That afternoon Rosen had gone back to the center of Plymouth, peddled more cloth, stopped in again at Ventura’s, and finally left on the last train at 6:10. He had got off at Whitman, about halfway between Plymouth and Braintree, and spent the night in a dollar room at Littlefield’s Rooming House. The next day he had continued to peddle his goods in Whitman. Katzmann spent an afternoon cross-examining Rosen, using the old legal trick known as taking the witness over the hurdles. Where, the district attorney asked Rosen, had he been on May 15, 1920; June 15, 1920; April 15, 1921; May 15, 1921, June 15, 1921? Rosen could not say, but he maintained he had particular reasons for remembering April 15, 1920. In the morning his wife had paid his delinquent 1918 poll tax and when he returned home next day she had given him the dated and receipted bill he now produced in court. Also, the evening of the fifteenth “it was all boiling” in Whitman about the South Braintree murders. Lillian Shuler, who ran Littlefield’s Rooming House, later corroborated Rosen by producing a record of having rented him a room the night of the fifteenth. When Vanzetti’s picture was published in the papers after his arrest and Rosen saw it and the words “fish peddler,” it reminded him of the day he sold the piece of blue cloth to the Italian in North Plymouth. He went to ask Alfonsina Brini about the matter the next time he happened to be in Plymouth, and it was through her that he came into the case. Alfonsina herself again appeared to testify for her old friend. Katzman had agreed not to refer to the Plymouth trial in return for the defense’s renouncing any evidence as to the peaceful and law-abiding reputation of the defendants. Regardless, in his summing-up he called Alfonsina “a stock, convenient and ready witness as well as friend who ... in another case when another date was alleged, testified to the whereabouts of this same Vanzetti on that other date there involved.” Alfonsina told much the same story that Rosen had told of the two men coming in to show her the damaged cloth. She recalled the date as the fifteenth because she had been ailing at the time and Dr. Shurtleff had come from Plymouth to see her on the fourteenth and sixteenth. In between those visits the Cordage nurse had called. Gertrude Matthews, a nurse at the Plymouth Cordage Company, said she had visited Alfonsina between the fifteenth and the twenty-fifth but could not recall the exact dates. LeFavre Brini, Alfonsina’s daughter, told of Vanzetti’s coming to their house at about ten o’clock the morning of the fifteenth with some fish which he had left in the sink. He had come back about noon with a peddler and she saw him hand a length of cloth to her mother. She recalled the date because her mother had been in the hospital and it was just a week after she had had to quit her own job at the Gorton-Pew Fisheries to care for her.