He would remind the jury that only a few weeks ago he stood there as the advocate of a powerful Company, then represented by the present defendant.  He spoke then as the champion of strict justice against legal oppression; no less should he to-day champion the cause of the unprotected and the comparatively defenseless—­save for that paramount power which surrounds beauty and innocence—­even though the plaintiff of yesterday was the defendant of to-day.  As he approached the court a moment ago he had raised his eyes and beheld the starry flag flying from its dome, and he knew that glorious banner was a symbol of the perfect equality, under the Constitution, of the rich and the poor, the strong and the weak—­an equality which made the simple citizen taken from the plough in the field, the pick in the gulch, or from behind the counter in the mining town, who served on that jury, the equal arbiters of justice with that highest legal luminary whom they were proud to welcome on the bench to-day.  The Colonel paused, with a stately bow to the impassive Judge.  It was this, he continued, which lifted his heart as he approached the building.  And yet—­he had entered it with an uncertain—­he might almost say—­a timid step.  And why?  He knew, gentlemen, he was about to confront a profound—­aye! a sacred responsibility!  Those hymn-books and holy writings handed to the jury were not, as his Honor had surmised, for the purpose of enabling the jury to indulge in—­er—­preliminary choral exercise!  He might, indeed, say, “Alas, not!” They were the damning, incontrovertible proofs of the perfidy of the defendant.  And they would prove as terrible a warning to him as the fatal characters upon Belshazzar’s wall.  There was a strong sensation.  Hotchkiss turned a sallow green.  His lawyers assumed a careless smile.

It was his duty to tell them that this was not one of those ordinary “breach-of-promise” cases which were too often the occasion of ruthless mirth and indecent levity in the court-room.  The jury would find nothing of that here.  There were no love-letters with the epithets of endearment, nor those mystic crosses and ciphers which, he had been credibly informed, chastely hid the exchange of those mutual caresses known as “kisses.”  There was no cruel tearing of the veil from those sacred privacies of the human affection; there was no forensic shouting out of those fond confidences meant only for one.  But there was, he was shocked to say, a new sacrilegious intrusion.  The weak pipings of Cupid were mingled with the chorus of the saints,—­the sanctity of the temple known as the “meeting—­house” was desecrated by proceedings more in keeping with the shrine of Venus; and the inspired writings themselves were used as the medium of amatory and wanton flirtation by the defendant in his sacred capacity as deacon.