hats off.  Everybody please rise,” while a second bailiff, standing at the left of his honor when he was seated, and between the jury-box and the witness-chair, recited in an absolutely unintelligible way that beautiful and dignified statement of collective society’s obligation to the constituent units, which begins, “Hear ye! hear ye! hear ye!” and ends, “All those of you having just cause for complaint draw near and ye shall be heard.”  However, you would have thought it was of no import here.  Custom and indifference had allowed it to sink to a mumble.  A third bailiff guarded the door of the jury-room; and in addition to these there were present a court clerk—­small, pale, candle-waxy, with colorless milk-and-water eyes, and thin, pork-fat-colored hair and beard, who looked for all the world like an Americanized and decidedly decrepit Chinese mandarin—­and a court stenographer.

Judge Wilbur Payderson, a lean herring of a man, who had sat in this case originally as the examining judge when Cowperwood had been indicted by the grand jury, and who had bound him over for trial at this term, was a peculiarly interesting type of judge, as judges go.  He was so meager and thin-blooded that he was arresting for those qualities alone.  Technically, he was learned in the law; actually, so far as life was concerned, absolutely unconscious of that subtle chemistry of things that transcends all written law and makes for the spirit and, beyond that, the inutility of all law, as all wise judges know.  You could have looked at his lean, pedantic body, his frizzled gray hair, his fishy, blue-gray eyes, without any depth of speculation in them, and his nicely modeled but unimportant face, and told him that he was without imagination; but he would not have believed you—­would have fined you for contempt of court.  By the careful garnering of all his little opportunities, the furbishing up of every meager advantage; by listening slavishly to the voice of party, and following as nearly as he could the behests of intrenched property, he had reached his present state.  It was not very far along, at that.  His salary was only six thousand dollars a year.  His little fame did not extend beyond the meager realm of local lawyers and judges.  But the sight of his name quoted daily as being about his duties, or rendering such and such a decision, was a great satisfaction to him.  He thought it made him a significant figure in the world.  “Behold I am not as other men,” he often thought, and this comforted him.  He was very much flattered when a prominent case came to his calendar; and as he sat enthroned before the various litigants and lawyers he felt, as a rule, very significant indeed.  Now and then some subtlety of life would confuse his really limited intellect; but in all such cases there was the letter of the law.  He could hunt in the reports to find out what really thinking men had decided.  Besides, lawyers everywhere are so subtle.  They put the rules of law, favorable or unfavorable, under