About fifty dollars. Making allowance for expenses of digging, what would be the value? About forty dollars. All these replies were wrung out from the prosecutor only by extreme pressure. He felt that he was in a bad position, and struggled hard against it. His face grew red, and big drops of perspiration rolled down over his forehead. “Forty dollars!” Mr. Long thundered out. “And yet you swear to five hundred dollars’ damage. You prosecute an aged, a virtuous, and an estimable fellow-citizen, and you dare to take an oath against him to such a frightful untruth! What is this? Is it malice, or what? But if malice, what is there that could ever have been done against you by one so simple-hearted and so true and honest as Captain Corbet?” All this produced a tremendous effect, on the spectators, on the prosecutor, and on Rhadamanthus. But now Mr. Long came down harder than ever upon the unfortunate prosecutor. He declared himself ready to prove that Captain Corbet never took away the stone fence at all. This was easily done. First, every one of the boys was summoned to give his simple statement of the facts. The whole truth came out, and it was clearly shown that Captain Corbet must have been in total ignorance of the whole transaction. To the testimony of the boys was added that of Mr. Simmons; and he, with all the rest, alluded in touching terms to the occupation of the captain while the stone wall was disappearing. Stone walls? Captain Corbet? _He_ touch them? Why, he was nursing his baby at home all the time! As the boys came forward, one by one, Captain Corbet looked at them, and listened in eager attention, with a smile of love on his meek and venerable face. As they spoke of his absence from the scene, that smile broadened into one of deeper affection; but finally, as they spoke of his occupation, of his home, of that morning when they found him there with his baby, it was too much. His heart beat fast,--a flood of tender recollections thronged into his memory,--tears started to his eyes. But what could he do? Nothing. He could only grasp the hands of those who stood nearest, and wring them, and murmur broken words:-- “Yes, sir. That’s so. That’s all gospel truth. It’s jest so. I wasn’t nigh the schewner. It was the babby. Him it was. I was a nussin of him, an a feedin of him, an a singin an a hummin to him. An I knowed nothin more about that thar stone wall than the man in the mune.” And all these words of Captain Corbet, together with the simple statements of the boys, combined to strengthen the convictions of the villagers that the poor captain was a deeply injured man.