The speaker usually rises a little outside of the subject, on a sort of neutral ground, and Bart made the transit of this, naturally and simply.  He graphically explained to the jury those legal phantoms, John Doe and Richard Roe; how Richard was always maltreating and dispossessing John, and how John was always going to law with Dick, and was hence an immense favorite with lawyers; and how, when Dick is sued, he always, having got up a muss, notifies the actual party in possession, and who ought to have been sued; tells him he must look out for himself, and hurries off to find where John has squat himself into other property; and thereupon he thrusts him out again, and so on.  It was a fiction invented by the English lawyers to try the right of two parties to the possession of real estate; because they could do it in no other way, and the 4th of July had not freed us from this relic of antiquity.  The issue here was, whether Fisk had a better right to the possession of this land, than had Cole; and whatever did not in some way help to enlighten them on that issue, had no business to be said at all.

In a few happy strokes, he sketched the defendant buying this land, packing up, bidding adieu to the dear down-country home, and his toilsome journey into the woods, arrival, and purchase, and poor, hard life of toil and deprivation:  here was his all.  He sketched the plaintiff as a well or ill-to-do gentleman, of a speculative turn of mind, whose eye coveted the rich bottom-lands of the defendant; and finding him helpless and poor, searched out the weak place in his title, hunted up obscure relatives, and procured for a song sung by themselves, their signatures to a deed of property of which they had never heard; he had proven that John Williams, Junior, son of John Williams, Senior, was born out of wedlock, had gone grubbing back into forgotten burying-places, and disinterred the dead, searched out the weakness of their lives; had raked out a forgotten scandal, carefully gathered it up in its rottenness, and had poured it out, before the jury; and the frailty and infamy of an unhappy woman, and the crime of one wretched man, were the sole virtue and strength of his case—­sole source of his title to the land in dispute.  And the plaintiff demanded that the law in its honor should now rob poor Cole of his homestead, and of the graves of his children, that John Fisk—­or rather, Sam Ward—­might possess that to which he had just the same moral right, that Dr. Myers had to the horses he stole.  And this learned Court, and gentlemen of the jury, pioneers in these receding woods, are to be the instruments of this transfer.

The language was simple and plain, the imagery bold and striking, and the closing sentences were pronounced with great fervor.  The jury shrank from the issue, which might have a possible conclusion, and looked eagerly for any escape, as jurors will.