Page:In bad company and other stories.djvu/98

 CHAPTER VII

inland town of Wagga Wagga, in New South Wales, historically celebrated as the dwelling-place of the Tichborne Claimant, where that lapsed scion of the aristocracy followed the indispensable but not socially eminent occupation of butcher, was, if not en fête, pardonably excited at the arrival of the Judge and officers of the Assize Court to be holden on the morrow.

This traditional spectacle—almost as interesting as the Annual Race Meeting or the Agricultural Show—was afforded to the inhabitants at half-yearly intervals. The curiosity aroused by these unfamiliar personages, before whom were decided the issues of freedom or imprisonment, life or death, was concentrated and intense. The Judge who presided, the Bar, the Deputy Sheriff, the Crown Prosecutor, the Associate, were objects of admiration to the denizens of a city three hundred miles from a metropolis—chiefly ignorant of other than rural life, and to whom the ocean itself was almost unknown. To the jurymen, culled from the town dwellers and the surrounding farms, the summons to aid in the administration of justice was a memorable solemnity.

The compulsory withdrawal from their ordinary avocations was fully compensated by urban pleasures, and doubtless aided their intelligent comprehension of the laws of the land.

Among the townspeople a certain amount of social festivity was deemed appropriate to the occasion.

It may therefore be imagined that among the young men and maidens the infrequent procession of the Judge's carriage, escorted by the Superintendent of Police and half-a-dozen