Browne gave his testimony in the same dry, polite and careful manner in which he had always been accustomed to discuss his cases and deliver his arguments.  It seemed wholly impossible to believe that this respectable-looking person could be a dangerous character, yet the nature of his offence and the consequences of it were apparent when the State called to the stand an old broom-maker, who had bought from Browne one of the lots belonging to the Petersen estate.  Holding up three stumps where fingers should have been, he cried out, choking with tears: 

“My vriends, for vifteen years I vorked at making brooms—­me und my vife—­from fife in the morning until six at night, und I loose mine fingern trying to save enough money to puy a house that we could call our own.  Then when we saved eight hundred dollars this man come to us und sold us a lot.  We were very happy.  Yesterday anoder man served me mit a paper that we must leave our house, because we did not own the land!  We must go away!  Where?  We haf no place to go.  Our home is being taken from us, und that man [pointing his stumps at Browne]—­that man has stolen it from us!”

He stopped, unable to speak.  The defendant’s lawyer properly objected, but, with this piece of testimony ringing in their ears, it is hardly surprising that the jury took but five minutes to convict Browne of forgery in the first degree.

A few days later the judge sentenced him to twenty years in State’s prison.

Then other people began to wake up.  The Attorney-General guessed that the Petersen property had all escheated to the State, the Swedish Government sent a deputy to make inquiries, the Norwegian Government was sure that he was a Norwegian, and the Danish that he was a Dane.  No one knows yet who is the real owner, and there are half a dozen heirs squatting on every corner of it.  Things are much worse than before Browne tried to sell the ill-fated lot to Levitan, but a great many people who were careless before are careful now.

It soon developed, however, that lawyer Browne’s industry and ingenuity had not been confined to the exploitation of the estate of Ebbe Petersen.  Before the trial was well under way the City Chamberlain of New York notified the District Attorney that a peculiar incident had occurred at his office, in which not only the defendant figured, but William R. Hubert, his familiar, as well.  In the year 1904 a judgment had been entered in the Supreme Court, which adjudged that a certain George Wilson was entitled to a one-sixth interest in the estate of Jane Elizabeth Barker, recently deceased.  George Wilson had last been heard of, twenty years before, as a farmhand, in Illinois, and his whereabouts were at this time unknown.  Suddenly, however, he had appeared.  That is to say, H. Huffman Browne had appeared as his attorney, and demanded his share of the property which had been deposited to his credit with the City Chamberlain and amounted