There were four other leading actors:  Mr. Pennington, K.C., and Mr. Vodrey, K.C., engaged by the plaintiff, and Mr. Cass, K.C., and Mr. Crepitude, K.C., engaged by the defendant.  These artistes were the stars of their profession, nominally less glittering, but really far more glittering than the player in scarlet.  Their wigs were of inferior quality to his, and their costumes shabby, but they did not mind, for whereas he got a hundred a week, they each got a hundred a day.  Three junior performers received ten guineas a day apiece:  one of them held a watching brief for the Dean and Chapter of the Abbey, who, being members of a Christian fraternity, were pained and horrified by the defendants’ implication that they had given interment to a valet, and who were determined to resist exhumation at all hazards.  The supers in the drama, whose business it was to whisper to each other and to the players, consisted of solicitors, solicitors’ clerks, and experts; their combined emoluments worked out at the rate of a hundred and fifty pounds a day.  Twelve excellent men in the jury-box received between them about as much as would have kept a K.C. alive for five minutes.  The total expenses of production thus amounted to something like six or seven hundred pounds a day.  The preliminary expenses had run into several thousands.  The enterprise could have been made remunerative by hiring for it Convent Garden Theatre and selling stalls as for Tettrazzini and Caruso, but in the absurd auditorium chosen, crammed though it was to the perilous doors, the loss was necessarily terrific.  Fortunately the affair was subsidized; not merely by the State, but also by those two wealthy capitalists, Whitney C. Witt and Mr. Oxford; and therefore the management were in a position to ignore paltry financial considerations and to practise art for art’s sake.

In opening the case Mr. Pennington, K.C., gave instant proof of his astounding histrionic powers.  He began calmly, colloquially, treating the jury as friends of his boyhood, and the judge as a gifted uncle, and stated in simple language that Whitney C. Witt was claiming seventy-two thousand pounds from the defendants, money paid for worthless pictures palmed off upon the myopic and venerable plaintiff as masterpieces.  He recounted the life and death of the great painter Priam Farll, and his solemn burial and the tears of the whole world.  He dwelt upon the genius of Priam Farll, and then upon the confiding nature of the plaintiff.  Then he inquired who could blame the plaintiff for his confidence in the uprightness of a firm with such a name as Parfitts.  And then he explained by what accident of a dating-stamp on a canvas it had been discovered that the pictures guaranteed to be by Priam Farll were painted after Priam Farll’s death.