I came away in good heart, because I was so delighted that there was not a vestige of anything the matter with me.

With a view to enable me to give each case due consideration before fixing the poor wretch’s doom after conviction, I invariably ordered the prisoner to stand down until all were tried.

I then spent a night in going through my notes in each case, so that if there were any circumstances that I could lay hold of by way of mitigation of the sentence, I did so.

I do not mean to say that I did this in trifling cases, such as a magistrate could dispose of, but in all cases of magnitude possibly involving penal servitude.

Once, however, I had made up my mind as to what was, in accordance with my judgment, the sentence to be passed, I took care never to alter it upon any plea in mitigation whatever.

For this line of conduct I had the example of Sir Thomas Wilde, when, as Lord Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, he travelled the Home Circuit.  He was a marvellous and powerful judge in dealing with the facts of a case.  He had tried a prisoner for larceny in stealing from a house a sack of peas.  The prisoner’s counsel had made for him a very poor and absurd defence, in which, over and over again, he had reiterated that one pea was very like another pea, and that he would be a bold man who would swear to the identity of two peas.

This miserable defence made the Lord Chief Justice angry, and he summed up the case tersely but crushingly to this effect:  “Gentlemen, you have been told by the learned counsel very truly that one pea is very like another pea, and if the only evidence in this case had been that one pea had been taken from the house of the prosecutor, and a similar pea had been found in the prisoners house, I for one should have said it would have been insufficient evidence to justify the accusation that the prisoner had taken it.

“But such are not the facts of this case; and when you find, as was the fact here, that on March 30 a sack appears in a particular place, marked with the prosecutor’s initials, safe in his house at night, where it ought to have been but was not, on the morning of the 31st; and when you find that on that morning a sack of peas of precisely similar character was in the house of the prisoner in a precisely similar sack behind the door, the question very naturally arises, How came those peas in that man’s house?  He says he found them; do you believe him?  Did it ever occur to you, gentlemen, to find a similar sack of peas in the dead of the night on any road on which you chanced to be travelling?

“The prosecutor says the prisoner stole them, and that is the question I ask you to answer.  Did he or not, in your opinion, steal them?”

I need not say what the verdict was.  The man was put back for sentence.  That is the point I am upon.

On the following morning the Lord Chief Justice, still a bit angry with the prisoner’s counsel for the miserable imposture he had attempted upon the jury, said,—­