Grymes and his colleagues instantly objected.  It was their own best gun captured and turned upon them.  They could not tolerate it.  It was no part of the record, they stoutly maintained, and must not be introduced nor read nor commented upon.  The point was vigorously argued on both sides; but when Roselius appealed to an earlier decision of the same court the bench decided that, as then, so now, “in suits for freedom, and in favorem libertatis_, they would notice facts which come credibly before them, even though they be dehors the record."[29] And so Roselius thundered it out.  The consul for Baden at New Orleans had gone to Europe some time before, and was now newly returned.  He had brought an official copy, from the records of the prefect of Salome’s native village, of the registered date of her birth.  This is what was now heard, and by it Salome and her friends knew to their joy, and Belmonti to his chagrin, that she was two years older than her kinsfolk had thought her to be.

Who followed Roselius is not known, but by and by men were bending the ear to the soft persuasive tones and finished subtleties of the polished and courted Grymes.  He left, we are told, no point unguarded, no weapon unused, no vantage-ground unoccupied.  The high social standing and reputation of his client were set forth at their best.  Every slenderest discrepancy of statement between Salome’s witnesses was ingeniously expanded.  By learned citation and adroit appliance of the old Spanish laws concerning slaves, he sought to ward off as with a Toledo blade the heavy blows by which Roselius and his colleagues endeavored to lay upon the defendants the burden of proof which the lower court had laid upon Salome.  He admitted generously the entire sincerity of Salome’s kinspeople in believing plaintiff to be the lost child; but reminded the court of the credulity of ill-trained minds, the contagiousness of fanciful delusions, and especially of what he somehow found room to call the inflammable imagination of the German temperament.  He appealed to history; to the scholarship of the bench; citing the stories of Martin Guerre, the Russian Demetrius, Perkin Warbeck, and all the other wonderful cases of mistaken or counterfeited identity.  Thus he and his associates pleaded for the continuance in bondage of a woman whom their own fellow-citizens were willing to take into their houses after twenty years of degradation and infamy, make their oath to her identity, and pledge their fortunes to her protection as their kinswoman.

Day after day the argument continued.  At length the Sabbath broke its continuity, but on Monday it was resumed, and on Tuesday Francis Upton rose to make the closing argument for the plaintiff.  His daughter, Miss Upton, now of Washington, once did me the honor to lend me a miniature of him made about the time of Salome’s suit for freedom.  It is a pleasing evidence of his modesty in the domestic circle—­where masculine modesty is rarest—­that