Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/876

814 The judge rapped loudly for order, but the room refused to take his gavel seriously until he himself had recovered his gravity. The counsel waited until quiet was restored, looking bored and not a little grieved at the interruption.

"But passing from rhymes to reason," he continued, "or, in other words, from poetry to potatoes, what do we find? Why, an argument which disposes of the suspicion that the able counsel, mistrusting the merits of his case, tried to divert you with poetry, or attempted to tickle your vanity with straws.

"Possibly, however, in the nervous tension of the moment—waiting for the next name to be called, and wondering which one would be 'It'—you may have missed his potato argument. Let me repeat it. If you sold him rotten potatoes, he asks, would it serve you to answer that you did not warrant that they were fit for food? Well, gentlemen, if he ate your potatoes and requested more, I think it might be, assumed that he approved the quality. Those are precisely the facts in this case. The defendant was as familiar with our goods as his attorney was with your names. He had frequently tried them and found them to his liking. It hardly seems fair, though, to refer to the testimony, since my opponent did not do so.

"However, you will remember what the witnesses said. But the defendant claims he tried to turn our goods into something else and they were unsuited to his purpose, and we have no right to be paid for them, as we should have known he could not make what he desired to make with them. Suppose he had attempted to manufacture cherry brandy out of your potatoes, would you feel responsible for the failure, especially if the price of cherry brandy had fallen shortly after his experiment? But this is another detail of testimony which, perhaps, I should not touch upon. I return again to your names, upon which my opponent loved to linger. Why he did so is a puzzle, but I have done my best to solve it, and asking 'What's in a name?' I find in the initial letters of yours a simple acrostic, spelling out your rightful verdict."

The speaker paused for a few moments, and then took from the table the sheet of paper on which he had been scribbling some comments during his opponent's speech.

"The first letters of Foster, Orton, Richards," he continued, "are F-O-R—For; Paulding, Lawton, Adams, Innes, Norton, make themselves P-L-A-I-N—Plain; and Thompson, Ireland, Perris, Pulsom spell T-I-F-F—tiff; in other words, 'For Plaintiff.' Pray take this significant arrangement of your names with you, gentlemen, when you retire for your verdict."

But the jury never retired to consider their verdict. They found it without leaving their seats.