ABOUT WITNESSES. ' I "HE strange statements, extraordinary -*admissions, prompt retorts, funny mis takes, crooked answers, and odd distortions of the Queen's English, heard in the courts, would make a plethoric volume of amusing reading. From an old English magazine we gather the following anecdotes of witnesses, some of which, we trust, will prove new to the readers of the "Green Bag." The subjects of legal vivisection do not find the process so agreeable to themselves as it is interesting to uninterested listeners. The old fellow who had " married three wives and buried them lawful " would prob ably have preferred keeping to himself the fact that a buxom laundress declined to make him a happy man for the fourth time in his life, because he was not prepared to take her to church in a basket-carriage drawn by six donkeys. The witness-box is prolific in malapropisms. The man whose friend could not ap pear in court by reason of his being just then superannuated with drink; the Irishwoman whose husband had often struck her with impunity, although he usually employed his fist; the gentleman who found a lady in the arms of Mopus; and the Chicago dame, who indignantly wanted to know who was telling the story, when the j udge suggested that when she spoke of the existence of a family fuel, she must mean family feud, — might one and all claim kindred with Sheridan's deranger of epithets. Nor could Dogberry himself have shown to greater advantage than a policeofficer, when, upon the stand in a New York court, he related how one Nelson had punched him twice in the head and scratched his face without aggravating him to use his club, because it went against his feelings to mistreat a human being; winding up what he termed his " conciseful " narration with : "I am willing to be let upon, your honor, but not altogether. The law must be dedicated; give him justice tampered with mercy."
The London policeman who found arrears of fat upon the blouses of two men suspected of purloining from a butcher would have smiled in scornful superiority to hear the Glasgow constable deposing that a riotous Irishman " came off the Bristol boat wi' the rest o' the cattle, and was making a crowd on the quay, offering to ficht him or any ither mon." " Well," asked the baillie, " did he stand on his defence when you told him to move on? " " No, your honor; he stood on the quay." Were members of the force al ways so exact, the magistrate who asked a street Arab, before putting him on his oath, what was done to people who swore falsely, would not have had his ears shocked with the reply, " They makes policemen out of 'em." Euphemisms are wasted upon lawyers, since they will insist upon having their equivalents. Said one witness : " He re sorted to an ingenious use of circumstantial evidence." " And pray, sir, what are we to understand by that? " inquired the counsel. "That he lied," was the reply of the witness, whose original statement was worthy of the doctor who testified that the victim of an assault had sustained a contusion of the integuments under the orbit, with extravasa tion of blood and ecchymosis of the sur rounding tissue, which was in a tumefied state, with abrasion of the cuticle, — meaning simply that the sufferer had a black eye. Another witness testified that the plaintiff's character was " slightly matrimonial." Be ing called upon to explain, he answered, "She has been married seven times." In a trial at Winchester a witness failing to make his version of a conversation intel ligible by reason of his fondness for " says I " and " says he," was taken in hand by Baron Martin, with the following result : "My man, tell us now exactly what passed." "Yes, my lord. I said I would not have the pig." " And what was his answer?" " He
