Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 09.pdf/354

 Rh On this point the court said : " Admitting, what it requires a large gift of credulity to admit, that five persons of the same age and name, but wholly unre lated to each other, disappeared at the same time from five different places, and were thereafter lost to all former acquaintances, and that these five persons so closely resembled each other that a single portrait would serve for the entire group, the difficulty would still remain of assigning, out of so many originals, his own proper personality to this decedent of adapt able likeness, who is proved to have been an exact copy of them all." To add to the absurdity, the Massachusetts claimants produced a photograph of their man, which they contended precisely resembled the pictures found in the decedent's possession, but in which the other claimants could not detect the smallest likeness to them! The trial court awarded the estate to the English claimants. This was re versed on appeal of the Massachusetts claimants, who lived at North Bridgewater, chiefly on the resemblance of their picture and the strength of the description of the decedent's person in the government certificate, and the property was awarded to the appellants. The court regarded the English claim as bearing " strong marks of having been manufactured after Captain Bryant's death, when the buzzards began to gather over an estate which seemed about to pass to the Commonwealth for want of real heirs." Of the re semblance between the pictures they say: "Such comparison leaves no doubt, in the minds of any of this court, of the strong resemblance . . . that such resemblance should exist between portraits of two different men. of the same name, of the same age, born in the same place, and following the same oc cupation, passes the bounds of credible accident." Of the different claimants' description of their rela tive they said : " The idea of succession to the fortune of a hitherto unknown relative exercises over even honest minos a fascination only to be compared to the gambler's desire to throw dice to get something for nothing." The case is rendered all the more romantic by the fact that the Massachusetts family had accepted news of the death of their kinsman, in New Orleans, about the time of the decedent's settle ment in Philadelphia, and had actually received his chest sent to Bridgewater from New Orleans. The court seem inclined to believe that the decedent al lowed himself to be supposed dead as reported. But how did that chest come to be sent to them from New Orleans? Of this they say no word, but we "rather guess" that the decedent falsely reported himself dead and himself sent home his chest. The case lacked only one element of consolation, which was derived by a Yankee, condoling with the widow of a sailor lost at sea. ''Was he a pious man, ma'am?" "Yes." "And did they save his chist?" "Yes."

321

"Well, ma'am, you've great reason to be thankful — he was a pious man, and you've got his chist." The Illinois claimants deduced title from their brother and uncle, Charles Bryant, born at North Bridgewater, in 1831. and who mysteriously disappeared during the emigration of the family to the west in wagons when he was two or three years old. He was manifestly too young. The claim from Maine was on behalf of Susan J. Calamer, who was married to a seafaring man of the name of Dean, in 1852, who came from Isleboro, Maine, and who disappeared in 1861; and it was based on the assumption that he took and lived under the name of Charles Bryant. The weak ness of this claim was in the fact that the witnesses to the identity had concealed their discovery for twenty or thirty years, and one of them, Dean's cousin, had suffered the wife to contract a second marriage in 1873. This witness explained his reticence by the statement that Dean, who was a brother Mason, had pledged him to secrecy, and also that Dean had been in prison and adopted this alias. Curiously, how ever, a stepson of the decedent testified that the latter had once told him that he came from Isleboro. Me. But the decedent had told others that he came from other parts of New England, and another step son always believed him to be English or Irish. On the whole it was "a pretty kettle of fish." and con firms our belief that there is nothing on earth so queer in domestic propensities as a sailor, except a cat. NOTES OF CASES. ACCORD AND SATISFACTION. — The Mississippi Supreme Court has been irreverent enough recently to deny the authority and scout the doctrine of Pin ners Case, 5 Co. Rep. 117 a; i Eng. Rui. Cas. 368, in which it was laid down that an unsealed agreement to accept, in discharge of a liquidated debt, a smaller sum in satisfaction, and the payment of such smaller sum, does not constitute a satisfaction of the whole. Until now, all courts, both English and American, have followed that case and assented to that doctrine. The Mississippi court now assert, and quite correctly, that this doctrine was not in volved in the Pinnil case, but was a mere dictum, the decision having really gone on a ground of pleading, namely, that the defendant did not plead that he had paid the smaller sum in satisfaction, but only generally that he had paid that sum and that the plaintiff had accepted it in satisfaction. The Mississippi court observe : " He lost, unhappy wretch that he was, born two or three centuries too soon, and not knowing the difference between legal tweedle dum and legal tweedle-dee." The court point out that in Foakes v. Beer, H. L. 1884; i Eng. Rui.