“I say, boys—­’tisn’t of any use, I reckon, for everybody to speak about what everybody knows.  One speaker’s quite enough in this here matter before us.  Here’s none of us that sha’n’t something to say agin this pedler, and the doings of the grand scoundrel in and about these parts, for a matter going on now about three years.  Why, everybody knows him, big and little; and his reputation is so now, that the very boys take his name to frighten away the crows with.  Now, one person can jist as well make a plain statement as another.  I know, of my own score, there’s not one of my neighbors for ten miles round, that can’t tell all about the rotten prints he put off upon my old woman; and I know myself of all the tricks he’s played at odd times, more than a dozen, upon ’Squire Nichols there, and Tom Wescott, and Bob Snipes, and twenty others; and everybody knows them just as well as I. Now, to make up the score, and square off with the pedler, without any frustration, I move you that Lawyer Pippin take the chair, and judge in this matter; for the day has come for settling off accounts, and I don’t see why we shouldn’t be the regulators for Bunce, seeing that everybody agrees that he’s a rogue, and a pestilence, and desarves regilation.”

This speech was highly applauded, and chimed in admirably with all prejudices, and the voice that called Lawyer Pippin to preside over the deliberations of the assembly was unanimous.  The gentleman thus highly distinguished, was a dapper and rather portly little personage, with sharp twinkling eyes, a ruby and remarkable nose, a double chin, retreating forehead, and corpulent cheek.  He wore green glasses of a dark, and a green coat of a light, complexion.  The lawyer was the only member of the profession living in the village, had no competitor save when the sitting of the court brought in one or more from neighboring settlements, and, being thus circumstanced, without opposition, and the only representative of his craft, he was literally, to employ the slang phrase in that quarter, the “cock of the walk.”  He was, however, not so much regarded by the villagers a worthy as a clever man.  It required not erudition to win the credit of profundity, and the lawyer knew how to make the most of his learning among those who had none.  Like many other gentlemen of erudition, he was grave to a proverb when the occasion required it, and would not be seen to laugh out of the prescribed place, though “Nestor swore the jest was laughable.”  He relied greatly on saws and sayings—­could quote you the paradoxes of Johnson and the infidelities of Hume without always understanding them, and mistook, as men of that kind and calibre are very apt to do, the capacity to repeat the grave absurdities of others as a proof of something in himself.  His business was not large, however, and among the arts of his profession, and as a means for supplying the absence of more legitimate occasions for its employment, he was reputed as excessively expert