porch, when Ibbetson heard the wheels and cast the door open, I kept my seat like a rock.  Pretty well pitch dark it was where I sat behind the lamps.  Ibbetson comes down the steps, opens the carriage door and stands aside.  After a moment he begins to breathe hard, pops his head into the brougham, then his arm, feels about a bit, and comes forward for a lamp.  “My God, Bill!” says Ibbetson, looking up at me in the dark.  “What have you done with th’ ould devil?"’

‘I really think,’ suggested Sir Felix hurriedly, ’we ought not to keep the Court waiting.’

So in we filed, and the Court rose respectfully to its feet and stood while we took our seats.  The Superintendent of Police—­an officer new to our Division—­gazed at me with a perfectly stolid face across the baize-covered table.  Yet somehow it struck me that the atmosphere in Court was not, as usual, merely stuffy, but electrical; that the faces of our old and tried constabulary twitched with some suppressed excitement; and that the Clerk was fidgeting with an attack of nerves.

‘Certain supplementary cases, your Worship,’ said he, taking a small sheaf of papers from the hands of his underling, ’too late to be included on the charge-sheet issued.’

‘Eh?—­Oh, certainly—­certainly!’ Sir Felix drew his spectacle case from his waistcoat pocket and laid it on the table; took the paper handed to him, and slipped it methodically beneath the sheet of agenda; resumed the business of extracting his spectacles, adjusted them, and gravely opened business.

He had it all to himself.  For me, as I, too, received the paper of supplementary cases, my first thought was of simple astonishment at the length of the list.  Then my gaze stiffened upon certain names, and by degrees as I recognised them, my whole body grew rigid in my chair.  Samuel Sleeman—­this was the Superintendent’s name—­appellant against Isaac Adamson, drunk and disorderly; Ditto against Duncan McPhae, drunk and disorderly; Ditto against Henry James Walters, drunk and disorderly; Ditto against Selina Mary Wilkins, drunk on licensed premises; Ditto against Mary Curtis, drunk on licensed premises; Ditto against Solomon Tregaskis, drunk on highway. . . .  There were no less than twenty-four names on the list; and each was the name of a retainer or pensioner of Sir Felix—­those aged Arcadians of Kirris-vean.

I glanced along the table and winced as I met Sir Felix’s eyes.  He was inclining towards me.  ’Five shillings and costs will meet this case, eh?’ he was asking.  I nodded, though without a notion of what case we were hearing. (It turned out to be one of cattle-straying, so no great harm was done.) Beyond him I saw Lord Rattley covering an infernally wicked grin with his arched palm; beyond Lord Rattley two estimable magistrates staring at that fatal supplementary paper as though they had dined and this was a bill they found themselves wholly unable to meet.