" The chairman with due gravity began:--
"Jared Bunce--is that your name?"
"Why, lawyer, I can't deny that I have gone by that name, and I guess
it's the right name for me to go by, seeing that I was christened Jared,
after old Uncle Jared Withers, that lives down at Dedham, in the state
of Massachusetts. He did promise to do something for me, seeing I was
named after him, but he ha'n't done nothing yet, no how. Then the name
of Bunce, you see, lawyer, I got from my father, his name being Bunce,
too, I guess."
"Well, Jared Bunce, answer to the point, and without circumlocution. You
have heard some of the charges against you. Having taken them down in
short-hand, I will repeat them."
The pedler approached a few steps, advanced one leg, raised a hand to
his ear, and put on all the external signs of devout attention, as the
chairman proceeded in the long and curious array.
"First, then, it is charged against you, Bunce, by young Dick Jenkins,
that stands over in front of you there, that somewhere between the
fifteenth and twenty-third of June--last June was a year--you came by
night to his plantation, he living at that time in De Kalb county; that
you stopped the night with him, without charge, and in the morning you
traded a clock to his wife for fifteen dollars, and that you had not
been gone two days, before the said clock began to go whiz, whiz, whiz,
and commenced striking, whizzing all the while, and never stopped till
it had struck clear thirty-one, and since that time it will neither
whiz, nor strike, nor do nothing.
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