In the bottom of his peritoneum Mr. Magnus felt that he carried a cold stone the size of a grapefruit.  His hands were ice, his lips bloodless.  And there was a Niagara where his hearing should have been.  But he rose, just as the book told him to do, in all his beauty, and enunciated in the crystal tones he had learned during the last few weeks at Madam Winterbottom’s school of acting and elocution—­in syllables chiseled from the stone of eloquence by the lapidary of culture: 

“If Your Honor please, I move the cause of the People of the state of New York against Theophilus Higgleby, indicted for bigamy.”

Peckham and the rest couldn’t believe their ears.  It wasn’t possible!  That perfect specimen of tonsorial and sartorial art, warbling like a legal Caruso, conducting himself so naturally, easily and casually, couldn’t be old Caput Magnus!  They pinched themselves.

“Say!” ejaculated Peckham.  “What’s happened to him?  When did Sir Henry sign up with us?”

Mr. Tutt across the inclosure in front of the jury box raised his bushy eyebrows and looked whimsically at the D. A. over his spectacles.

“Are you ready, Mr. Tutt?” inquired the judge.

“Entirely so, Your Honor,” responded the lawyer.

“Then impanel a jury.”

The jury was impaneled, Mr. Caput Magnus passing through that trying ordeal with great eclat.

“You may proceed to open your case,” directed the judge.

The staff saw a very white Caput Magnus rise and bow in the direction of the bench.  Then he stepped to the jury box and cleared his throat.  His official associates held their breath expectantly.  Would he—­or wouldn’t he?  There was a pause.

Then:  “Mister Foreman and gentlemen of the jury,” declaimed Caput in flutelike tones:  “The defendant is indicted for the crime of bigamy, an offense alike repugnant to religion, civilization and to the law.”

The words flowed from him like a rippling sunlit stream; encircled him like a necklace of verbal jewels, a rosary, each word a pearl or a bead or whatever it is.  With perfect articulation, enunciation and gesticulation Mr. Caput Magnus went on to inform his hearers that Mr. Higgleby was a bigamist of the deepest dye, that he had feloniously, wilfully and knowingly married two several females, and by every standard of conduct was utterly and entirely detestable.

Mr. Higgleby, flanked by Tutt and Mr. Tutt, listened calmly.  Caput warmed to his task.

The said Higgleby, said he, had as aforesaid in the indictment committed the act of bigamy, to wit, of marriage when he had one legal wife already, in New York City on the seventeenth of last December, by marrying in Grace Church Chantry the lady whom they saw sitting by the other lady—­he meant the one with the red feather in her bonnet—­that is to say, her hat, whereas the other lady, as he had said aforesaid, had been lawfully and properly married to the defendant the preceding May, to wit, in Chicago as aforesaid—­