The article in the March number of the "Green Bag " entitled "Some Curious Pleas" recalled to the writer's mind a collection of similar pleas which he came across in an old English magazine. Some of them will bear repeating, and will form, perhaps, an interesting and amusing appendix to the article already published.

Brougham, defending a rogue charged with stealing a pair of boots, unable to gainsay his client's guilt, demurred to his conviction because the articles appropriated were half-boots, and half-boots were no more boots than a half-guinea was a guinea, or half a loaf a whole one. The objection was over ruled by Lord Eskgrove, who with befitting solemnity said : "I am of the opinion that 'boot' is a nomen generate, comprehending a half-boot; the moon is always the moon, although she is sometimes a half-moon." Had Brougham proved the boots to be old ones, he would probably have come off as triumphantly as a tramp tried at Warwick for stealing four live fowls. The fowls had been "lifted" in Staffordshire; still the indictment was declared good, it being held that a man committed felony in every county through which he carried stolen property; but when it came out in evidence that the fowls were dead when the thief was taken, he was at once set free on the ground that he could not be charged with stealing four live fowls in Warwickshire.

The specious plea that killing is no murder if the killing be done to serve a political purpose, was put in in a French case. The accused objected to being condemned to death for murdering his wife and child, because capital punishment for political of fences was abolished, and he only executed his relations because they were Legitimists; a plea that proved as ineffectual as the argument of the French advocate, that as his client by killing his father and mother had rendered himself an orphan, it was the duty of society to protect the bereaved creature.

A baker's man was charged with embezzling twelve pounds of his master's money. Admitting this fact, he pleaded in extenuation that he had laid out every penny upon religious tracts, which he gave away as he went his round, and actually got off with a gentle intimation from the magistrate that "it was a mistake to take money in a dishonest manner for a religious purpose"!

A plea bad in one sense may be good in another. A man lent another a ladder. After the lapse of a few months he wanted it back again, but the borrower flatly refused to give it up. He thereupon sued him for the value of the ladder. The defendant pleaded that the ladder was borrowed on an express condition,—that he was to return it as soon as he had done with it. He had not done with it, and therefore no action would lie. The plaintiff was nonsuited.

For cool impertinence the answer of a Welsh Railway Company in an action brought by a gentleman for the cost of a conveyance he had taken, after waiting in a station until twenty minutes past one for the departure of a train advertised to start at five minutes past twelve, is unequalled. The company contended that punctuality would be inconvenient to the public, and that the plaintiff had no business to trust to their time-tables, as the irregularity of the train service was notorious. The latter plea was ingenious certainly, but not so daring in its ingenuity as that advanced by certain grocers, who accounted for the presence of iron filings in the tea they sold, by averring that the soil of China was strongly impregnated with iron, and the iron must have been blown upon the leaves before they were gathered.