the astonishment of the court, instead of a volume of Viner's abridgment,
he took out a specimen candlestick, the property of a Birmingham traveller,
whose bag the learned sergeant had brought into court by mistake.


During the long vacation, the sergeant usually retired to his country seat
at Rowell in Northamptonshire. It happened, during one autumn, that some of
the neighbouring sportsmen, among whom was the present Earl Spencer, being
in pursuit of a fox, Reynard, who was hard pressed, took refuge in the
court-yard of this venerable sage. At this moment the sergeant was reading
a _case in point_, which decided that in a trespass of this kind the owners
of the ground had a right to inflict the punishment of death. Mr. Hill
accordingly gave orders for punishing the fox, as an original trespasser,
which was done instantly. The hunters now arrived with the hounds in full
cry, and the foremost horseman, who anticipated the glory of possessing the
brush, was the first to behold his victim stretched lifeless on the ground,
pinioned to the earth by plebeian pitchforks. The hunters were very anxious
to discover the daring culprit who had presumed to deprive the field and
the pack of their prey; when the venerable sergeant made his appearance,
with his book in his hand, and offered to convince them that execution had
taken place according to legal authority. The sportsmen got outrageous, but
the learned sergeant was not intimidated; he knew the force of his
authorities, and gravely invited the attention of his auditory to a case
from one of the old reporters, that would have puzzled a whole bar of
modern practitioners to controvert. The effect was ludicrous; the
extraordinary appearance of the worthy sergeant, not in his bargown, but in
what these adventurous mortals called a mere bedgown; the quaintness of his
manner, the singularity of the occurrence, and the novelty of the incident,
threw them completely out.