AN ELOQUENT ADDRESS.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVI, Issue 7, 20 February 1908, Page 38

AN ELOQUENT ADDRESS.

The days of true eloquence have not 'passed, as was e\idenced in a civil case in an American Court. Ihe plaintiff li^ed at the head of a stream, and the defendant lived about a mile or two lower down the stream. In the month of May the ".plaintiff's sow strayed down the valley and did much damage in defendant's garden. The allegation was that defendant had killed her. A young lawyer employed to aid the solicitor m the prosecution, with a solemn, air, opened up the case in this fashion : ~ ' May it please your Honor, and you, gentlemen of the jury. Since the days of the assassination of the .lamented president of the Una ted States, to wit, Abraham Lincoln, no such foul crime has stained our country's escutcheon as the assassination of Mr. Edward's black and white spotted sow. Genilemen of the jury, and may it please our Honor, go with me to the place of the tragedy and contemplate the scene and the circumstances. On that lovely morning' in May, when the earth ■was dressed in her robes of green and the air filled with the smell of sweet-scented flowers and enlivened by" the voice of 'merry songsters, as that old sow walked forth in 'her innocence down that little stream, listening to the music of the waters, little did she dream that before the king; of day, hid himself behind the western horizon she should become the victim of a foul assassination.'