“Well, no, I don’t know that they told me, but that’s neither here nor there.  I know, without that, that at dinner yesterday, Angelo was as tired as a dog, and yet Luigi wouldn’t lend him the legs to go up-stairs and take a nap with.”

“Did he ask for them?”

“Let me see—­it seems to me, somehow, that—­that—­Aunt Betsy, do you remember whether he—­”

“Never mind about what Aunt Betsy remembers—­she is not a witness; we only want to know what you remember yourself,” said the judge.

“Well, it does seem to, me that you are most cantankerously particular about a little thing, Sim Robinson.  Why, when I can’t remember a thing myself, I always—­”

“Ah, please go on!”

“Now how can she when you keep fussing at her all the time?” said Aunt Betsy.  “Why, with a person pecking at me that way, I should get that fuzzled and fuddled that—­”

She was on her feet again, but Allen coaxed her into her seat once more, while the court squelched the mirth of the house.  Then the judge said: 

“Madam, do you know—­do you absolutely know, independently of anything these gentlemen have told you—­that the power over their legs passes from the one to the other regularly every week?”

“Regularly?  Bless your heart, regularly ain’t any name for the exactness of it!  All the big cities in Europe used to set the clocks by it.”  (Laughter, suppressed by the court.)

“How do you know?  That is the question.  Please answer it plainly and squarely.”

“Don’t you talk to me like that, Sim Robinson—­I won’t have it.  How do I know, indeed!  How do you know what you know?  Because somebody told you.  You didn’t invent it out of your own head, did you?  Why, these twins are the truthfulest people in the world; and I don’t think it becomes you to sit up there and throw slurs at them when they haven’t been doing anything to you.  And they are orphans besides—­both of them.  All—­”

But Aunt Betsy was up again now, and both old ladies were talking at once and with all their might; but as the house was weltering in a storm of laughter, and the judge was hammering his desk with an iron paper-weight, one could only see them talk, not hear them.  At last, when quiet was restored, the court said: 

“Let the ladies retire.”

“But, your honor, I have the right, in the interest of my clients,—­to cross-exam—­”

“You’ll not need to exercise it, Mr. Wilson—­the evidence is thrown out.”

“Thrown out!” said Aunt Patsy, ruffled; “and what’s it thrown out for, I’d like to know.”

“And so would I, Patsy Cooper.  It seems to me that if we can save these poor persecuted strangers, it is our bounden duty to stand up here and talk for them till—­”

“There, there, there, do sit down!”