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194 certain articles that had been pledged to him at different times by this humble agent. Now, Brandon, in examining the guilty go-between, became the more terribly severe, in proportion as the man evinced that semblance of unconscious stolidity, which the lower orders so ingeniously assume, and which is so peculiarly adapted to enrage and to baffle the gentlemen of the bar. At length Brandon, entirely subduing and quelling the stubborn hypocrisy of the culprit, the man turned towards him a look between wrath and beseechingness, muttering—

"Aha!—If so be, Counsellor Prandon, you knew vat I knows, you vould not go for to bully I so!"

"And pray, my good fellow, what is it that you know that should make me treat you as if I thought you an honest man?"

The witness had now relapsed into sullenness, and only answered by a sort of grunt. Brandon, who knew well how to sting a witness into communicativeness, continued his questioning, till the