“Silence!” he roared. Then, quieter: “Mr. Hopple, is there a jewelry box buried on that line?”
“Then the shadow doesn’t exist,” Mr. Hopple’s lawyer—a bulldog of a woman named Mrs. Vex—said sharply. “Case closed.” lomp court case
“Call your first witness,” Judge Shanks said, peering over spectacles that magnified his eyes to an alarming size. “Silence
Mrs. Prunella Bramble, a retired taxidermist with a fondness for peacock feathers, claimed that her neighbor, Mr. Otis Hopple, had erected a fence that violated the town’s ancient boundary accord—specifically, a clause concerning “the path of the noonday shadow.” Mr. Hopple, a beekeeper whose bees had grown as irritable as he had, argued that the shadow clause was null and void because the oak tree that cast it had been struck by lightning in ’82. Hopple’s lawyer—a bulldog of a woman named Mrs
But Judge Shanks held up a hand. “The law,” he said slowly, “does not merely concern itself with what exists. It concerns itself with what ought to exist. Proceed.”
“And is the Old Mast Oak still standing?” asked Mrs. Bramble’s lawyer, a young man named Crispin who had graduated from correspondence school.