“The same.  There’s cats around here with names that would surprise you.  Maria” (to his wife), “what was that cat’s name that eat a keg of ratsbane by mistake over at Hooper’s, and started home and got struck by lightning and took the blind staggers and fell in the well and was ’most drowned before they could fish him out?”

“That was that colored Deacon Jackson’s cat.  I only remember the last end of its name, which was Hold-The-Fort-For-I-Am-Coming Jackson.”

“Sho! that ain’t the one.  That’s the one that eat up an entire box of Seidlitz powders, and then hadn’t any more judgment than to go and take a drink.  He was considered to be a great loss, but I never could see it.  Well, no matter about the names.  Mrs. Brown wanted to be reasonable, but Mrs. Jones wouldn’t let her.  She put her up to going to law for damages.  So to law she went, and had the face to claim seven shillings and sixpence.  It made a great stir.  All the neighbors went to court.  Everybody took sides.  It got hotter and hotter, and broke up all the friendships for three hundred yards around friendships that had lasted for generations and generations.

“Well, I proved by eleven witnesses that the cat was of a low character and very ornery, and warn’t worth a canceled postage-stamp, anyway, taking the average of cats here; but I lost the case.  What could I expect?  The system is all wrong here, and is bound to make revolution and bloodshed some day.  You see, they give the magistrate a poor little starvation salary, and then turn him loose on the public to gouge for fees and costs to live on.  What is the natural result?  Why, he never looks into the justice of a case—­never once.  All he looks at is which client has got the money.  So this one piled the fees and costs and everything on to me.  I could pay specie, don’t you see? and he knew mighty well that if he put the verdict on to Mrs. Brown, where it belonged, he’d have to take his swag in currency.”

“Currency?  Why, has Bermuda a currency?”

“Yes—­onions.  And they were forty per cent. discount, too, then, because the season had been over as much as three months.  So I lost my case.  I had to pay for that cat.  But the general trouble the case made was the worst thing about it.  Broke up so much good feeling.  The neighbors don’t speak to each other now.  Mrs. Brown had named a child after me.  But she changed its name right away.  She is a Baptist.  Well, in the course of baptizing it over again it got drowned.  I was hoping we might get to be friendly again some time or other, but of course this drowning the child knocked that all out of the question.  It would have saved a world of heartbreak and ill blood if she had named it dry.”

I knew by the sigh that this was honest.  All this trouble and all this destruction of confidence in the purity of the bench on account of a seven-shilling lawsuit about a cat!  Somehow, it seemed to “size” the country.