"Why, certainly," answered the district attorney,

"Did you hear me ask him what he paid for that ready-made pine
door he claimed to be working on when he saw the assault?"

The prosecutor recalled the incident and nodded.

"Well, he said ten dollars--and I knew he was a liar. A door
like that don't cost but four-fifty!"

It is, perhaps, too much to require a knowledge of carpentry
on the part of a lawyer trying an assault case. Yet the juror
was undoubtedly right in his deduction.

In a case where insanity is the defence, the State must dig up
and have at hand every person it can find who knew the accused
at any period of his career. He will probably claim that in
his youth he was kicked in a game of foot-ball and fractured
his skull, that later he fell into an elevator shaft and had
concussion of the brain, or that he was hit on the head by a
burglar. It is usually difficult, if not impossible, to
disprove such assertions, but the prosecutor must be ready, if
he can, to show that foot-ball was not invented until after
the defendant had attained maturity, that it was some other
man who fell down the elevator shaft, and to produce the
burglar to deny that the assault occurred. Naturally,
complete preparation for an important trial demands the
presence of many witnesses who ultimately are not needed and
who are never called. Probably in most such cases about half
the witnesses do not testify at all. Most of what has been