shore.  Now, all this is corroborative evidence, and of a sort not to be despised.  Indeed, as to one point, that of the approximate date of the execution of the tattooing, it is to my mind final.  Still, there does remain an enormous amount that must be accepted or not, according as to whether or no credence can be placed in the unsupported testimony of Miss Smithers, for we cannot call on a child so young as the present Lord Holmhurst, to bear witness in a Court of Justice.  If Miss Smithers, for instance, is not speaking the truth when she declares that the signature of the testator was tattooed upon her under his immediate direction, or that it was tattooed in the presence of the two sailors, Butt and Jones, whose signatures were also tattooed in the presence of the testator and of each other—­no will at all was executed, and the plaintiff’s case collapses, utterly, since, from the very nature of the facts, evidence as to handwriting would, of course, be useless.  Now, I approach the decision of this point after anxious thought and some hesitation.  It is not a light thing to set aside a formally executed document such as the will of Nov. 10, upon which the defendants rely, and to entirely alter the devolution of a vast amount of property upon the unsupported testimony of a single witness.  It seems to me, however, that there are two tests which the Court can more or less set up as standards, wherewith to measure the truth of the matter.  The first of these is the accepted probability of the action of an individual under any given set of circumstances, as drawn from our common knowledge of human nature; and the second, the behaviour and tone of the witness, both in the box and in the course of circumstances that led to her appearance there.  I will take the last of those two first, and I may as well state, without further delay, that I am convinced of the truth of the story told by Miss Smithers.  It would to my mind be impossible for any man, whose intelligence had been trained by years of experience in this and other courts, and whose daily duty it is to discriminate as to the credibility of testimony, to disbelieve the history so circumstantially detailed in the box by Miss Smithers (Sensation).  I watched her demeanour both under examination and cross-examination very closely indeed, and I am convinced that she was telling the absolute truth so far as she knew it.

“And now to come to the second point.  It has been suggested, as throwing doubt upon Miss Smithers’ story, that the existence of an engagement to marry, between her and the plaintiff, may have prompted her to concoct a monstrous fraud for his benefit; and this is suggested although at the time of the execution of the tattooing no such engagement did, as a matter of fact, exist, or was within measurable distance of the parties.  It did not exist, said the Attorney-General; but the disposing mind existed:  in other words, that she was then ’in love’—­if, notwithstanding Mr. Attorney’s difficulty in