John K. Porter. or clause of a sentence. Mrs. Parish had the sole possession and control of his person. She assumed the sole possession and control of his estate. He saw only those whom she permitted him to see. He saw them only when she permitted him to see them. She introduced two of her brothers into his man sion at Union Square to preside over it with her, at the expense of the estate, as joint heads of the establishment. Fortunately for her purpose and theirs, another of these brothers, now here as claim ants, was his attending physician. She cashiered his standing counsel, and filled the vacant place by assigning to him the counsel of the family, a gentleman of great distinction, to whom Mr. Parish had never spoken. She dedicated to his religious uses, her friend, her guest, her bene ficiary, the Reverend Pastor of Grace Church. Having favored him with these surroundings, she claimed to be the only medium of intelligent com munication between him and the rest of the human race. Such are the circumstances under which Mrs. Parish claims to have received from her abso lute dependant a succession of gifts intervening between apoplexy and death, to the amount of $100,000 annually, and running through the dark est years of his life, — those in which he most needed wealth, and the alleviations with which it so often mitigates the pressure of age, disease, and calamity." To sustain these various gifts inter vivos as well as testamentary, testimony had been introduced to show that the husband, though an apoplectic, paralytic, epileptic mute, was otherwise in perfect health and of sound and disposing mind and memory; that though the vocal organs were paralyzed and he had lost the power of speech, yet he was able by other sounds or signs intelligible to Mrs. Parish, at times, and occasionally to others with her aid, to communicate intelligent ideas; that possessing these powers, he had exercised them of his own free will; and notwithstanding the presumption aris ing from her absorption of his estate in im provident and constant gifts, that he had made these codicils without undue influence. Every legal presumption was against the validity of the gifts and codicils; and to up hold these presumptions against this proof
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was the duty especially assigned to Mr. Por ter. I venture to believe that professional work in the law was never better done. The analysis of evidence was keen, merciless, and exhaustive; the demonstration of a fraudu lent design was always clear and convincing and at times overpowering. A lurid sar casm, and contempt for the actors in the shameful drama, hot from an honest and in dignant heart, flash through the argument like summer lightning in a storm. Here are one or two specimens : — "The breath of God which shipwrecked the mind of Henry Parish fell like a zephyr upon his pious wife. As early as the 14th of August, a little more than a month after he was prostrated, she claims to have been fanned by a Divine afflatus. She announces this heavenly visitation in a letter to his sisters of that date, the writing of which she excuses on grounds that recall the pleas of the crier of Bristol, — that ' he might be spared from crying that day because his wife was dead ' — for she assumes that their brother, of whom they were ' so proud,' being in the condition Mr. Parish was, and they aware of it, therefore they ' will scarcely expect to hear from her at that grievous time; ' on which plea probably it was that she allowed him to die within four hundred yards of those attached sisters, without letting them know he was dying. 'So difficult is it,' she says, 'to comprehend his language, — at first, of course, just as unintelligible to me, but now, thank God. I seem inspired with understanding, and really do understand him.' . . . "The Reverend Dr. Taylor, rector of Henry Parish as well as of the Parish of Grace Church, evidently a pluralist and entitled to take tithes from both, was often in this manner beguiled into what would seem almost 'judicial blindness.' This good man was enabled to believe that his disabled parishioner ' discerned the Lord's body ' in the most solemn and mystical ordinance of the Chris tian religion, when it is abundantly proved that the bewildered communicant could not even rec ognize a woodcock in its feathers.1 Nor was any 1 It had been proved that before his calamity Mr. Parish, who was a ton vivant, had always marketed for his own table, and that his opinions were much esteemed by purveyors of all sorts. Afterwards he had been driven by Mrs. Parish over the accustomed rounds, where to his old acquaintances she interpreted his rolling head and ceaseless "Na, na I " sometimes to approve and some
