a natural misfortune, from which others had suffered as well as the plaintiff—only, they had never thought of going to law about it. The defendant broadly hints that the plaintiff has an eye to his property, and is trying to oust him from it by a vexatious action. The matter in dispute was trifling enough, and the jury must have been inclined to laugh at the solemnity with which they were implored to give their best attention to all the details of the case. "There is no greater nuisance" (so the defendant begins his pleading) "than a covetous neighbour, which it has been my lot to meet with. Callicles has set his heart on my land, and worries me with litigation. First he got his cousin to claim it from me, but I defeated that claim. I beseech you all to hear me with attention—not because I am any speaker, but that you may learn by the facts how groundless the action is." After he has explained the facts, he asks pathetically what he is to do with the water, if he may not drain it off either into the public road or into private ground. "Surely," he adds, with a touch of bucolic humour, "the plaintiff won't force me to drink it up?" The damage done could not have been very ruinous, if we may judge from a single specimen. It appears that the mothers of the two litigants used to visit each other, as country neighbours; and on one occasion, when the defendant's mother was calling at the plaintiff's house, she found the family plunged in the deepest distress, and apparently crushed by some more than ordinary calamity. It would seem that the rustic mind then, as now, was peculiarly sensitive to the most ludicrously trifling loss, and
