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148 to look at the case hopefully, and to think that something might be done with it. He talked to me with such effect that he not only convinced me that there was a good deal to be said in Mrs. Briggs's favour, but I actually began to look upon her as an innocent victim of circumstantial evidence, and determined that no effort should be wanting on my part to procure her release from a degrading but unmerited confinement.

Of the firm of Poddle & Shaddery I knew nothing whatever, and how they came to entrust Mrs. Briggs's case to me I can form no conception. As we (for Polter took so deep a personal interest in the success of Mrs. Briggs's case that he completely identified himself, in my mind, with her fallen fortunes,) resolved to go to work in a thoroughly business-like manner, we determined to commence operations by searching for the firm of Poddle & Shaddery in the Law List. To our dismay the Law List of that year had no record of Poddle, neither did Shaddery find a place in its pages. This was serious, and Polter did not improve matters by suddenly recollecting that he once heard an old Q.C. say that, as a rule, the farther west of Temple Bar the shadier the attorney; so that assuming Polter's friend to have come to a correct conclusion on this point, a firm dating officially from Brompton Square, and whose name did not appear in Mr. Dalbiac's Law List, was a legitimate object of suspicion. But Polter, who took a hopeful view of anything which he thought might lead to good farce "situations," and who probably imagined that my first appearance on any stage as counsel for the defence was likely to be rich in suggestions, remarked that they