appears that one of his half-dozen counsel still claims as
owing to him for his services on the first trial the modest
sum of thirty-five thousand dollars. The cost of the whole
defence was probably ten times that sum. Most of the money
goes to the lawyers, and the experts take the remainder.

It goes without saying that both prosecutor and attorney for
the defence must be masters of the subject involved. A trial
for poisoning means an exhaustive study not only of analytic
chemistry, but of practical medicine on the part of all the
lawyers in the case, while a plea of insanity requires that,
for the time being, the district attorney shall become an
alienist, familiar with every aspect of paranoia, dementia
praecox, and all other forms of mania. He must also reduce
his knowledge to concrete, workable form, and be able to
defeat opposing experts on their own ground. But such
knowledge comes only by prayer and fasting--or, perhaps,
rather by months of hard and remorseless grind.

The writer once prosecuted a druggist who had, by mistake,
filled a prescription for a one-fourth-grain pill of calomel
with a one-fourth-grain pill of morphine. The baby for whom
the pill was intended died in consequence. The defence was
that the prescription had been properly filled, but that the
child was the victim of various diseases, from acute gastritis
to cerebro-spinal meningitis. In preparation the writer was
compelled to spend four hours every evening for a week with
three specialists, and became temporarily a minor expert on
children's diseases. To-day he is forced to admit that he
would not know a case of acute gastritis from one of mumps.