I just got a decision over in Nebraska in the case of Whinnery _vs._ The C. & S. W. It shows that Providence is still looking out for the righteous man and his seed. Never heard of Whinnery _vs._ the Railway Company? Well, it may put you wise to a legal principle or two, and I'll tell you about it. I was ag'in' the corporations over there, as associate counsel for the plaintiff. Bob Fink, that studied in my office, was the fellow the case belonged to, and he being a little afraid of Absalom Scales, the railroad's local attorney, sent over a Macedonian wail to me, and said we'd cut up a fifty per cent, contingent fee if we won. I went. Amelia Whinnery was the plaintiff. She was a school-teacher who had got hold of the physical culture graft, and was teaching it to teachers' institutes, making forty dollars a minute the year around. "How much?" asked the Hired Man. "I'm telling you what the record showed as I remember it," said the Colonel. "We proved that she was doing right well financially when the railroad put her out of business by failing to ring a bell or toot a whistle at the crossing coming into Tovala, and catching Bill Williams' bus asleep at the switch. Miss Whinnery was in the bus. When it was all over, she was in pretty fair shape--" "Naturally," interpolated the Artist. "Excepting that her nerves had got some kind of a shock and she was robbed permanently of the power of speech." "How terrible!" exclaimed the Bride. On the trial she sat in the court-room in a close-fitting dress, wearing a picture hat, and would give a dumb sort of gurgle when Scales would pitch into her case, as if to protest at being so cruelly assaulted while defenseless. It was pathetic. Bob Fink shed tears, while he pictured to the jury in his opening, the agony of this beautiful girl set off from her kind for life, as the preponderance, the clear preponderance of the evidence showed she would be, by dumbness--"an affliction, gentlemen of the jury, which seals her lips forever as to the real facts, and stops the reply she could otherwise make to the dastardly attack of my honorable and learned friend, the attorney for this public-service corporation, which has been clothed with the power to take away your land, gentlemen of the jury, or mine, whether we want to sell it or not, and to rob us of our produce by its extortionate freight rates, and to run its trains into and through our cities, and over our busses, and to maim and injure our ladies, and bring them before juries of their peers, who, unless I mistake, will administer a stinging rebuke to this corporation without a soul to save or a body to kick, in the only way in which it can be made to feel a rebuke--in damages, out of that surplus of tainted dollars which its evil and illegal practices have wrung from the hard hands of toil as represented by the farmers and laborers who so largely compose this highly-intelligent jury." "Good spiel," commented the Groom.