Penny Blood Serial Fiction — page 68: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE JUDGE AND JURY SOCIETY o1 the guests who heard it that the newcomer was ‘‘a cut above the generality of them.”’ Three or four individuals in gowns, wigs, and white bands, and looking as if they had just arrived from Westminster Hall, now entered the apartment and took their seats at the table appropriated to the barristers. They carried in their hands bundles of papers duly tied around with red tape, and having as completely the air of “briefs’’ as if their connection with John Doe and Richard Roe were an actual fact instead of an agreeable fiction. In a most lawyer-like style, too, did these gentlemen who performed the part of barristers untie the tapes, arrange their papers before them, take great dips of ink with long, feathery pens, and make endorsements upon their pseudo-briefs, writing down imag- inary fees 1n real figures. — Presently the usher of the court threw the door wide open, shouting, in a stentorian voice, “‘ Silence and hats off, for the lord chief baron! ”’ These mandates were at once complied with, but there was a general sensation as the object of this ceremony, -ascending the stairs, made his appearance, if not as a real judge, at least in the garb and with the gravity of one. This was Mr. Nicholson, the landlord of the tavern, and the presiding genius of the Judge and Jury Society. No ordinary character in his way is the personage just. introduced. He is a man of good intellectual acquirements, of agreeable manners, and of great conversational powers. He has a readiness of wit, a facility of good-natured sarcasm, and a tact in selzing upon any passing incident to render it available for his purposes, which admirably qualify him for the ju- dicial part which he thus enacts. He is a really clever man, and as ready at his pen as with his tongue. In private life he bears the character of a liberality, a generosity, and a kindness of heart which have often made him lose sight of his own interests in ministering to the wants of others. Lord Chief Baron Nicholson is therefore not only “ a capital fellow’’ in the man-about-town acceptance of the term, but in its most true and literal meaning. In personal ap- pearance he is short and stout, — a living evidence of the good qualities of his own larder. Of convivial disposition, his ample countenance beams with a natural bonhomie which he cannot possibly subdue even when putting on the gravity GOmiicdoo cS (C(O)