Louie, the Dane, said that while the Claimant was on board his ship he amused himself by picking oakum and reading “The Garden of the Soul.”

There were several Ospreys spoken to as having picked up the Claimant after the wreck of the Bella, and the defendant had not the least idea which one was the best to carry him safely into harbour.  The defendant’s counsel, notwithstanding, had told the jury that he, Hawkins, had not ventured to contradict one or other of the stories of the wreck, and had not called the captain of the Osprey which had picked him up.

Comment on such a proposition in advocacy would be ridiculous.  Mr. Hawkins dealt with it by an example which the reader will remember as having occurred in his early days:—­

“‘We don’t know which Osprey you mean.’  ‘Take any one,’ says the defendant’s counsel, reminding me of the defence of a man charged with stealing a duck, and having given seven different accounts as to how he became possessed of it, his counsel was at last asked which he relied on.  ‘Oh, never mind which,’ he answered; ’I shall be much obliged if the jury will adopt any one of them.’

“You remember, gentlemen, the touching words in which the defendant’s counsel spoke of Bogle:  ‘He is one of those negroes,’ said he, ’described by the author of “Paul and Virginia,” who are faithful to the death, true as gold itself.  If ever a witness of truth came into the box, that witness was Bogle.’

“Well, you have seen him—­Old Bogle!  What do you think of him?  Was there ever a better specimen of feigned simplicity than he?  ‘Bogle,’ cries the defendant, after all those years of estrangement, ’is that you?’ ‘Yes, Sir Roger,’ answered Bogle; how do you do?’

“‘Do you remember giving me a pipe o’ baccy?’ asks a poor country greenhorn down at Alresford.  ‘Yes,’ answers the Claimant.  ’Then you’re the man,’ says the greenhorn.  Such was the way evidence was manufactured.

“A poor lady—­you remember Mrs. Stubbs—­had a picture of her great-great-grandfather’s great-grandfather.  In goes the Claimant, and in his artful manner shows his childhood’s memory.  ‘Ah, Mrs. Stubbs,’ says he, looking at another picture, ’that is not the old picture, is it?’ (Somebody had put him up to this.) No, sir,’ cries Mrs. Stubbs, delighted with his recollection—­’no, sir; but please to walk this way into my parlour,’ And there, sure enough, was the picture he had been told to ask for.

“‘Ah!’ he exclaims, ‘there it is; there’s the old picture!’

“How could Mrs. Stubbs disbelieve her own senses?”

One, Sir Walter Strickland, declined to see the Claimant and be misled, and was roundly abused by the defendant’s counsel.  One of the jury asked if he was still alive.  “Yes,” said the Lord Chief Justice, although the defendant expressed a hope that they would all die who did not recognize him....