after a few sentences his effects were exhausted and he lost his grip on the audience. The theatrical people smiled at one another contemptuously. Jadassohn noticed this and began to swing his arms until his gown whirled about him; his voice rose to a shriek and his ears glowed. The painted ladies fell on the rails of their seat in a paroxysm of uncontrollable giggling. "Is Sprezius blind?" asked the Mayor's mother-in-law. But the Bench was fast asleep. Diederich inwardly rejoiced. This was his revenge on Jadassohn, who could devise nothing except what he had already employed in setting the pace! It was all over, as Wulckow knew; and Sprezius knew it, therefore he slept with his eyes open. Jadassohn knew it best of all, and the noisier he became the more ineffective he was. When he finally called for a penalty of two years' imprisonment, all the people he had bored disagreed with him, even the judges, as it seemed. Old Kühleman gave a snore and awoke with a start. Sprezius blinked his eyes several times to arouse himself, and then called upon counsel for the defence.
Wolfgang Buck stood up slowly. His curious friends in the audience gave a murmur of applause and Buck calmly waited until they had finished, in spite of the threatening beak of Sprezius. Then he declared lightly, as if it would be all over in two minutes, that the evidence had shown the defendant in a thoroughly favourable light. Counsel for the prosecution was wrong in his view that the testimony of witnesses had any value, who had been intimated by ruthless attacks upon their own private lives. Or rather, it had the value of proving incontrovertibly the innocence of the defendant, since so many well-known friends of truth could only be blackmailed into—Of course he was not allowed to continue. When the judge had calmed down Buck imperturbably resumed. Even if they accepted as proven, that the defendant had really uttered the expression with which he was charged, then the idea of guilt was untenable. The witness Hessling had publicly admitted
