lowest orders, but who, seemingly enjoying large connections, and
possessing natural acuteness and address, appeared to have been of great
use in receiving and disposing of such goods as were fraudulently
obtained. As a witness against the latter person appeared a pawnbroker,
who produced certain articles that had been pledged to him at different
times by this humble agent. Now, Brandon, in examining the guilty
go-between, became the more terribly severe in proportion as the man
evinced that semblance of unconscious stolidity which the lower orders
can so ingeniously assume, and which is so peculiarly adapted to enrage
and to baffle the gentlemen of the bar. At length, Brandon entirely
subduing and quelling the stubborn hypocrisy of the culprit, the man
turned towards him a look between wrath and beseechingness, muttering,--

"Aha! _if_ so be, Counsellor Prandon, you knew vat I knows. You vould
not go for to bully I so!"

"And pray, my good fellow, what is it that you know that should make me
treat you as if I thought you an honest man?"

The witness had now relapsed into sullenness, and only answered by a sort
of grunt. Brandon, who knew well how to sting a witness into
communicativeness, continued his questioning till the witness, re-aroused
into anger, and it may be into indiscretion, said in a low voice,--

"Hax Mr. Swoppem the pawnbroker what I sold 'im on the 15th hof
February, exactly twenty-three yearn ago." Brandon started back, his
lips grew white, he clenched his hands with a convulsive spasm; and while
all his features seemed distorted with an earnest yet fearful intensity
of expectation, he poured forth a volley of questions, so incoherent and
so irrelevant that he was immediately called to order by his learned