she reflected that, after all, it was not a very uncommon occurrence for him to have a jury case; and when he privately came and offered to compromise she wondered what there had ever been to frighten her in the man. She refused the compromise, of course: if her case had been only half as strong she would have refused it.

Rap! rap! Silence, please. His honor appeared, wiping his learned brow, for it was an oppressively hot day, and the clerk proclaimed that all persons might draw near and be heard by the honorable court. The jurors answered to their names. Mr. Juddson, seated by his sister's elbow, pushed the jury-list towards her, with a slight nod of encouragement. Mrs. Tarbell did not need encouragement: she knew the names of the objectionable jurors by heart, and she was quite ready.

The court-room settled down into a hush of subdued expectation, and Stiles vs. The Railway Company was called. Mr. Pope and Mrs. Tarbell rose, bowed to each other and to the court: they were ready to go on.

Mr. Pope drew first blood. Eight jurors were already in the box, and the clerk called out, "John Ewing." John Ewing took his seat; there was no cross against his name, and Mrs. Tarbell had no challenge to make, when, before another name could be called, he leaned forward and called out, in an easy voice, "Mrs. Tarbell, ef I have to swear in this case I mout as well tell you that I used to work for the railway company."

"Ah!" said Mrs. Tarbell calmly, after a moment's hesitation. "Take your seat, Mr. Ewing. I have entire confidence in your impartiality." She waved her hand as if to include the whole of the jury, so far as completed,—nay, the whole of the panel,—in the compliment, and the jurors appeared to be suitably impressed.

But Mr. Pope rose. "Wait one minute, Mr. Ewing," he said, in a voice which breathed rugged honesty and uncompromising determination. "I shall have to ask you to withdraw." He shook his head sternly. "I cannot, whatever may be the generous toleration of my learned opponent, I cannot knowingly allow anybody who has any connection with my client to go on the jury."

"That makes four challenges for him," whispered Mr. Juddson. Mrs. Tarbell shook her head impatiently, and as Mr. Ewing left the box he smiled a faint yet unmistakable smile at somebody in the crowd, and Mrs. Tarbell became instantly convinced that the whole affair, even to the drawing of Mr. Ewing's name by the court clerk, was a neatly-arranged plot of Mr. Pope's, and, in her resentment, she challenged the next juror out of hand, though he had an eye so humid and sympathetic that he looked good for not only sentimental damages, but punitive damages of the most revengeful description.

But she opened her case admirably. There was a slight hum as she rose; her attitude was dignified, and she might have been called handsome. Though every one else was stifling with the heat, she looked cool and self-possessed, and her first sentences won her the respect of the bar; for she made the matter-of-course explanation in a fairly novel manner.

"Gentlemen of the jury," said she, "you know without my telling you that when my client, the plaintiff, Mrs. Stiles, comes here and says that she has suffered at the hands of the railway company damages to the amount of ten thousand dollars, she is not exaggerating her sufferings for the sake of enlisting your sympathy. It is not that she comes to you with feminine weakness, displaying her injuries, and, with feminine resentment, overstating them and their effects, to rouse your pity. You know, and I only remind you of it, that the rule of law forbids you to give her more than she asks for: so I, on her behalf, take care that she shall not ask for less than you might give her."

This was very well, and the jury probably understood as much.

Mrs. Tarbell paused a moment, and then proceeded in an impressive voice: "But Mrs. Stiles's injuries, gentlemen, are not slight; she does not ask you for a mere nominal sum in compensation of them, nor, in view of the facts, will any sum that you do give her seem excessive. I shall show you, gentlemen, that Mrs. Stiles, a widow, left almost penniless by her husband, who has by her own efforts brought up and educated four children, two of whom are still entirely dependent upon her, was, on the ninth day of April last, through the negligence of the defendant, injured in such a way as to give her seven weeks of the most painful suffering and to render her unable for the rest of her life to do the work upon which she has hitherto mainly depended for the support of herself and her family. I shall show you that Mrs. Stiles attempted to get on one of the defendant's cars; that while she was so doing the car was started and she thrown off; that she sustained a sprain of the right ankle and a fracture of the fibula; that the accident has resulted in laming her for life and incapacitating her for the use of a sewing-machine; and that it was by her sewing-machine that she supported herself. Mrs. Stiles will now tell you her own story."

With this Mrs. Tarbell sat down. She had not the keen penetration which years of practice give to a finished advocate, but she had feminine instinct, which served her in quite as good stead; and, short as was the time she had been addressing that jury, she felt that she could answer for it as certainly as fifteen years before she could have answered for one of her admirers. If Mr. Juddson had only been another woman she could have told him this, but a glance would have been wasted on him: so she kept her triumph to herself. She looked at the bullet-headed young juror, at the benignant old juror, at the fat-faced and dropsical juror, at the preternaturally-solemn negro juror, at the lantern-jawed foreman with the black moustache; she was on a perfectly good understanding with them, and knew what to say to each one of them. She felt that she could have afforded to be a little less brief. However, Mrs. Stiles would not— By the way, where was Mrs. Stiles?

"Mrs. Stiles!" cried Mrs. Tarbell, half rising. "Mrs. Stiles, will you please take the stand?"

Mrs. Stiles rose from her seat against the railing, and, after confiding her second daughter to the care of Miss Celandine,—a ceremony which was performed by her with evident anxiety,—hobbled to the witness-stand on the arm of Mr. Mecutchen, who had been sitting beside her.

Mrs. Stiles on the witness-stand was a very different person, apparently, from Mrs. Stiles in an every-day situation. It may have been the effect of the crowd or the effect on her system of her long and painful illness, but she was agitated and nervous to the last degree. She looked steadily at Mrs. Tarbell, except when, every now and then, she looked uneasily about the room, and she gave her answers in so low a voice that the judge two or three times asked her to repeat them. But otherwise all went well enough. Mrs. Stiles knew who she was, where she lived, and what she had been doing on the day of the accident. When the critical moment came, Mrs. Tarbell caught her breath, but Mrs. Stiles avoided the difficulty in safety.

"I held up my umbereller for that there car to stop," she said; "and it stopped. And I went to git on; and then the first thing I knew I was falling."

This was highly satisfactory. For the rest, Mrs. Stiles described the manner in which the doctors had vainly endeavored to cure her injured ankle, told how she had passed sleepless night after night in spite of the morphia and sweet spirits of nitre, how she had been confined to her bed for three weeks and had only got up to be moved to a chair, how she suffered tortures and lost her appetite, how it was months before she could walk without crutches, and how every step she took gave her the most excruciating agony, and so forth, and so forth. She also, at Mrs. Tarbell's request, gave to the jury several interesting details concerning, first, her