a man who could not do his work properly without the watchful correction of the judge.  But Mr. Walters, whose legal training had imbued in him a respect for Latin tags, subscribed to the adage, de mortuis nil nisi bonum.  Therefore he began his address to the jury with a glowing reference to the loss, he might almost say the irreparable loss, which the judiciary had sustained, he would go so far as to say the loss which the nation had sustained by the death, the violent death, in short, the murder, of an eminent judge of the High Court Bench, whose clear and vigorous intellect, whose marvellous mastery of the legal principles laid down by the judicial giants of the past, whose inexhaustible knowledge drawn from the storehouses of British law, whose virile interpretations of the principles of British justice, whose unfailing courtesy and consideration to Counsel, the memory of which would long be cherished by those who had had the privilege of pleading before him, had made him an acquisition and an ornament to a Bench which in the eyes of the nation had always represented, and at no time more than the present—­at this point Mr. Walters bowed to the presiding judge—­the embodiment of legal knowledge, legal experience, and legal wisdom.

After this tribute to the murdered man and the presiding judge, Mr. Walters proceeded to lay the facts of the crime before the jury, who had read all about them in the newspapers.

With methodical care he built up the case against the accused man, classifying the points of evidence against him in categorical order for the benefit of the jury.  The most important witness for the prosecution was a man known as James Hill, who had been in Sir Horace Fewbanks’s employ as a butler.  Hill’s connection with the prisoner was in some aspects unfortunate, for himself, and no doubt counsel for the defense would endeavour to discredit his evidence on that account, but the jury, when they heard the butler tell his story in the witness box, would have little difficulty in coming to the conclusion that the man Hill was the victim of circumstances and his own weakness of temperament.  However much they might be disposed to blame him for the course he had pursued, he was innocent of all complicity in his master’s death, and had done his best to help the ends of justice by coming forward with a voluntary confession to the police.

Mr. Walters made no attempt to conceal or extenuate the black page in Hill’s past, but he asked the jury to believe that Hill had bitterly repented of his former crime, and would have continued to lead an honest life as Sir Horace Fewbanks’s butler, if ill fate had not forged a cruel chain of circumstances to link him to his past life and drag him down by bringing him in contact with the accused man Birchill, whom he had met in prison.  Sir Horace Fewbanks was the self-appointed guardian of a young woman named Doris Fanning, the daughter of a former employee on his country estate, who had died leaving her penniless.