“My client, the only daughter of a widowed mother—­who has for years stemmed the varying tides of adversity—­in the western precincts of this town—­stands before you today invested only in her own innocence.  She wears no—­er—­rich gifts of her faithless admirer—­is panoplied in no jewels, rings, nor mementoes of affection such as lovers delight to hang upon the shrine of their affections; hers is not the glory with which Solomon decorated the Queen of Sheba, though the defendant, as I shall show later, clothed her in the less expensive flowers of the king’s poetry.  No! gentlemen!  The defendant exhibited in this affair a certain frugality of—­er—­pecuniary investment, which I am willing to admit may be commendable in his class.  His only gift was characteristic alike of his methods and his economy.  There is, I understand, a certain not unimportant feature of religious exercise known as ‘taking a collection.’  The defendant, on this occasion, by the mute presentation of a tip plate covered with baize, solicited the pecuniary contributions of the faithful.  On approaching the plaintiff, however, he himself slipped a love-token upon the plate and pushed it towards her.  That love-token was a lozenge—­a small disk, I have reason to believe, concocted of peppermint and sugar, bearing upon its reverse surface the simple words, ‘I love you!’ I have since ascertained that these disks may be bought for five cents a dozen—­or at considerably less than one half-cent for the single lozenge.  Yes, gentlemen, the words ’I love you!’—­the oldest legend of all; the refrain, ’when the morning stars sang together’—­were presented to the plaintiff by a medium so insignificant that there is, happily, no coin in the republic low enough to represent its value.

“I shall prove to you, gentlemen of the jury,” said the Colonel, solemnly, drawing a Bible from his coat-tail pocket, “that the defendant, for the last twelve months, conducted an amatory correspondence with the plaintiff by means of underlined words of sacred writ and church psalmody, such as ‘beloved,’ ‘precious,’ and ‘dearest,’ occasionally appropriating whole passages which seemed apposite to his tender passion.  I shall call your attention to one of them.  The defendant, while professing to be a total abstainer—­a man who, in my own knowledge, has refused spirituous refreshment as an inordinate weakness of the flesh, with shameless hypocrisy underscores with his pencil the following passage and presents it to the plaintiff.  The gentlemen of the jury will find it in the Song of Solomon, page 548, chapter II, verse 5.”  After a pause, in which the rapid rustling of leaves was heard in the jury-box, Colonel Starbottle declaimed in a pleading, stentorian voice, “’Stay me with —­er—­flagons, comfort me with—­er—­apples—­for I am—­er—­sick of love.’  Yes, gentlemen!—­yes, you may well turn from those accusing pages and look at the double-faced defendant.  He desires—­to—­er—­be