' Here Mr. Phunky bowed
and smiled, and the judge bowed and smiled too, and then Mr.
Phunky, blushing into the very whites of his eyes, tried to look as
if he didn't know that everybody was gazing at him, a thing
which no man ever succeeded in doing yet, or in all reasonable
probability, ever will.
'Go on,' said the judge.
The ushers again called silence, and Mr. Skimpin proceeded
to 'open the case'; and the case appeared to have very little inside
it when he had opened it, for he kept such particulars as he
knew, completely to himself, and sat down, after a lapse of
three minutes, leaving the jury in precisely the same advanced
stage of wisdom as they were in before.
Serjeant Buzfuz then rose with all the majesty and dignity
which the grave nature of the proceedings demanded, and
having whispered to Dodson, and conferred briefly with Fogg,
pulled his gown over his shoulders, settled his wig, and addressed
the jury.
Serjeant Buzfuz began by saying, that never, in the whole
course of his professional experience--never, from the very first
moment of his applying himself to the study and practice of the
law--had he approached a case with feelings of such deep
emotion, or with such a heavy sense of the responsibility imposed
upon him--a responsibility, he would say, which he could never
have supported, were he not buoyed up and sustained by a conviction
so strong, that it amounted to positive certainty that the
cause of truth and justice, or, in other words, the cause of his
much-injured and most oppressed client, must prevail with the
high-minded and intelligent dozen of men whom he now saw in
that box before him.
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