Page:Henry Northcote (IA henrynorthcote00snairich).pdf/133

 *ping with perspiration. "It is only a sort of opening roughly blocked out. It will have to be rendered a bit finer, so that it pins them like a fly on a card."

"You'll pin them to-morrow, sir," said Z9; "you'll get your verdict, see if you don't!"

Z9 spoke with the proud consciousness of one who can respond to an intellectual pleasure. X012, with a mental organization of less delicacy, although impressed by so rare a personality, yet retained the reverence for facts of the honest Englishman.

"He've a gift right enough, Bill," said X012 magisterially, "but the law is the law to my mind; and black's black an' white's white. If this woman done the crime—I don't say she did, mind—the law will 'ang her. An' rightly, too. This gentleman is a book-learned man and a horator,—I know that because I heard Gladstone on Blackheath,—but the law is the law and horatory ain't a-going to alter it."

"I am obliged to you both for your courtesy," said Northcote, with a perfect gravity, "and my obligation is even the deeper for the opinions you have been good enough to express. You are prototypes of the twelve honest men I am going to sway; and I take it that if my address were to be launched in its present immature shape, you, sir, would record your vote for an acquittal, and you, sir, for the severity of the law?"

"The law is the law I say," said X012, inflating his chest before the honor of this direct canvass of his intelligence, "an' words is words, although,