The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney | Page 8

cried the sheriff. An officer was about to do so;
but the judge motioned him to desist. His lordship's features worked
convulsively. He seemed striving to speak, but the words would not
come.
"I suppose, my lord," continued Cartwright in low and hissing tones, as
the shadow of unutterable despair grew and settled on his face--"I
suppose you know that his wife destroyed herself. The coroner's jury
said she had fallen accidentally into the water, I know better. She
drowned herself under the agonies of a broken heart! I saw her corpse,
with the dead baby in its arms; and then I felt, knew, that I was lost!
Lost, doomed to everlasting perdition! But, my lord,"--and here the
wretch broke into a howl wild and terrific--"we shall go down
together--down to where your deserts are known. A--h--h! that pinches
you, does it? Hound of a judge! legal murderer! coward! I spurn and
spit upon thee!" The rest of the appalling objurgation was inarticulate,
as the monster, foaming and sputtering, was dragged by an officer from
the dock.
Judge A ---- had fallen forwards on his face, fainting and speechless
with the violence of his emotions. The black cap had dropped from his
brow. His hands were stretched out across the bench, and various
members of the bar rushed to his assistance. The court broke up in
frightful commotion.
Two days afterwards the county paper had the following

announcement:--
"Died at the Royal Hotel, ------, on the 27th instant, Judge A ----, from
an access of fever supervening upon a disorder from which he had
imperfectly recovered."
The prophecy was fulfilled!

THE NORTHERN CIRCUIT.
About the commencement of the present century there stood, near the
centre of a rather extensive hamlet, not many miles distant from a
northern seaport town, a large, substantially-built, but somewhat
straggling building, known as Craig Farm (popularly Crook Farm)
House. The farm consisted of about one hundred acres of tolerable
arable and meadow land; and at the time I have indicated, belonged to a
farmer of the name of Armstrong. He had purchased it about three
years previously, at a sale held, in pursuance of a decree of the High
Court of Chancery, for the purpose of liquidating certain costs incurred
in the suit of Craig versus Craig, which the said high court had nursed
so long and successfully, as to enable the solicitor to the victorious
claimant to incarcerate his triumphant client for several years in the
Fleet, in "satisfaction" of the charges of victory remaining due after the
proceeds of the sale of Craig Farm had been deducted from the gross
total. Farmer Armstrong was married, but childless; his dame, like
himself, was a native of Devonshire. They bore the character of a
plodding, taciturn, morose-mannered couple: seldom leaving the farm
except to attend market, and rarely seen at church or chapel, they
naturally enough became objects of suspicion and dislike to the prying,
gossiping villagers, to whom mystery or reserve of any kind was of
course exceedingly annoying and unpleasant.
Soon after Armstrong was settled in his new purchase another stranger
arrived, and took up his abode in the best apartments of the house. The
new-comer, a man of about fifty years of age, and evidently, from his
dress and gait, a sea-faring person, was as reserved and unsocial as his
landlord. His name, or at least that which he chose to be known by, was
Wilson. He had one child, a daughter, about thirteen years of age,
whom he placed at a boarding-school in the adjacent town. He seldom
saw her; the intercourse between the father and daughter being
principally carried on through Mary Strugnell, a widow of about thirty

years of age, and a native of the place. She was engaged as a servant to
Mr. Wilson, and seldom left Craig Farm except on Sunday afternoons,
when, if the weather was at all favorable, she paid a visit to an aunt
living in the town; there saw Miss Wilson; and returned home usually
at half-past ten o'clock--later rather than earlier. Armstrong was
occasionally absent from his home for several days together, on
business, it was rumored, for Wilson; and on the Sunday in the first
week of January 1802, both he and his wife had been away for upwards
of a week, and were not yet returned.
About a quarter-past ten o'clock on that evening the early-retiring
inhabitants of the hamlet were roused from their slumbers by a loud,
continuous knocking at the front door of Armstrong's house: louder and
louder, more and more vehement and impatient, resounded the blows
upon the stillness of the night, till the soundest sleepers were awakened.
Windows were hastily thrown open, and presently numerous footsteps
approached the scene of growing hubbub. The unwonted noise was
caused,