She

which appellee was so traveling collided with a west-bound mail train on the same road, and the claimed injuries suffered by appellee were thereby incurred. The trial in the Superior Court resulted in a verdict for $12,000, from which appellee remitted the sum of $3000, and thereupon a judgment for $9000 in favor of appellee was entered, and this appeal is from such judgment. The appellee was about forty-six years of age, and resided on a farm in Wisconsin with her two sons and a daughter. had lived there twenty-six years, and performed all the usual household duties, and was in good health before the accident. She testified that previous to the collision she averaged from 135 to 140 pounds in weight, and that at the time of the trial (four years after) her weight was 170 pounds. In the collision the baggage-master was killed and another employee severely hurt, but no passenger except appellee was injured. The collision occurred about eleven o'clock in the forenoon of May 7, 1891. The locomotive and the express and baggage cars were disabled, but the passenger coach in which appellee traveled was, at least, left fit for present use; and about the middle of the afternoon it was attached to another train, and appellee continued onward in her journey to New York, where she arrived about eleven o'clock the following day, and on the day after that proceeded on to her ultimate destination in Connecticut.

The only evidence the record furnishes of what her condition was after the accident, and prior to her reaching Connecticut, is found in the testimony of the appellee. After she had been in Connecticut a "few days," according to her testimony, and some time in "the latter part of May, 1891," according to his testimony, a physician was for the first time called to treat her. That physician visited her twelve

or

fourteen times between his first call and June 17th following, and on the faith of her representations of pain and disability suffered by her, and of certain external bruises, contusions and discolorations seen by him on her person, he prescribed for her during that period. Appellee remained visiting at her niece's house in Connecticut some six months, and until in November, 1891, when she returned to Chicago, visiting on the way her sister in Linesville, Pennsylvania, and a cousin in Pierrepont, Ohio. She remained in Chicago for a while and then went to Wisconsin for a short time, after which she returned to Chicago, and through the intervention of a friend was accepted at St. Luke's hospital as a patient, and remained there three weeks, in February, 1892. It was while in St. Luke's hospital that she for the first time had medical treatment after that referred to in Connecticut.

There were not many objective symptoms (to use the language of the doctor) of physical injury to her visible at the time she entered St. Luke's hospital, nor do we understand from the evidence that any such have become apparent since that time. The evidence from that time on, and there is a great deal of it, with reference to her injuries, deals wholly with subjective symptoms, and for its weight rests upon her own statements and actions; and there is in some of the medical testimony, in her own testimony, and in the clinical report or record of her case, made when she was an inmate of St. Luke's hospital, considerable evidence of a lack of genuineness in her case probably not of actual simulation of an injury not received, or of actual malingery, as recorded against the record of her case in St. Luke's hospital, but of an exaggeration of the injury, owing to a highly wrought up condition of the nervous system, produced primarily by the injury and intensified by brooding over it. The only pecuni

ary loss suffered by the appellee, that is shown by the evidence, is her disability to pursue her usual avocations as before, and her expenses in endeavoring to be cured.

As to what such expenses were, appellee was asked by her counsel if she could state to the jury, or approximate, the amount of money she had expended for such purpose, and she replied that she could not, but added, "I should say in the neighborhood of $3000;" and upon being asked if she were able to give the items, answered: "I am not; no, sir." Her treatment in St. Luke's hospital was free, and that received by her in the sanitarium at Joliet, for the two days that she remained there, was in return for services rendered by her. And the physician who attended her in Connecticut testified that $15 would cover his entire bill for services to her. Drawing all reasonable inferences from all the other evidence concerning what may have caused expense to her, it seems as if her estimate of $3000 was needlessly extravagant, if not recklessly so. . . .

Looking only at the record, the appellee does not inspire us with much confidence in her statement of facts concerning which other proof is preserved, and hence we cannot avoid a distrust as to those facts of which her testimony furnishes the only evidence. That circumstances "should admonish us to look with suspicion upon whatever else he (she) may choose to swear to," as was said by Mr. Justice Caton in a case (Fryrear v. Lawrence, 5 Gil. 325, p. 329) where one swore to hearsay matters as being within his own knowledge. See also Earle v. Earle, 60 Ill. App. 360, p. 367. Appellee testified among other things concerning the results of the collision to the car that she was in, as follows: "The stove was overturned, the lamps were shattered and broken, the oil falling all over the passengers; the window glass was shattered and the car took fire, and the rear

end of the car seemed to be thrown. up a great distance." We have not exhausted the record with reference to each of the details she so testified to; but it was clearly established by other evidence that the stove was not overturned, that the car did not take fire, that the windows, with perhaps one exception, were not broken, and that if any lamp. was broken, no one complained of oil falling upon them. This testimony of the appellee was probably not at all material to her right of recovery, but it shows her unreliability and tendency to exaggeration. If she is so prone to magnify immaterial matters, what confidence can we place upon her testimony as to material facts? Moreover, her testimony heretofore referred to, regarding the expense the had incurred in her endeavors to become cured, is so utterly and recklessly exaggerated beyond any facts shown, and is so entirely improbable, considering her apparent means, as to cast further suspicion upon all her statements.

Considering, therefore, appellee's own testimony in connection with the uncertainty of much of the medical evidence and the records of St. Luke's hospital, wherein the diagnosis of her case is set down as "Malingery," we feel that there has not been that certainty obtained regarding the extent of her injuries as warrants us in sustaining a judgment which of itself amounts to a small fortune, and is far in excess of what we think the record shows would constitute full compensation. . . .

It seems, however, from a careful consideration of the whole record, that the appellee should have recovered a reasonable judgment, and if appellee shall elect within ten days to enter in this court a remittitur of six thousand dollars from the judgment of the Superior Court, the judgment will be affirmed for the amount so remitted down to; otherwise the judgment will be reversed and the cause remanded.

night the farmer was roused from his sleep by the prisoner's knocking at his door and telling him there were burglars in the house. Seizing his gun, the farmer, in company with the prisoner, cautiously descended the stairs and made his way to the sitting room. It was evident that some one had been there, for the furniture had been shifted about, and a purse and one or two other trifles were missing from the mantelpiece. The farmer rushed to the front door, and hearing, as he thought, the sound of retreating footsteps down the gravel path, fired his gun in the direction without effect. The burglars had effected their escape. The next day the police were duly informed of the occurrence, and thanks to the very clear description the prisoner was able to give one of the burglars she had particularly noticed as having a golden mustache and patent leather boots-placards

were posted at the different Police Stations, and a general hue and cry took place over the length and breadth of the country.

Days and weeks passed without any trace of the burglars, but the police, though baffled, had not been listless. The golden mustache and the patent leather boots were a clew indeed, but not in the direction they had been seeking. They began to suspect their clever little informant, and when it was discovered that she had been spending money be

yond the amount of her wages in the nearest town within a few days of the burglary, out of the very purse which was missing, the police felt certain that they had got the real criminal, and she was duly arrested and committed to the Quarter Sessions. I was instructed for the defense. It transpired that the prisoner was much given to reading penny dreadfuls, and that for weeks before the burglary, she had discussed the possibility of such a thing happening with a fellow servant who shared her room. There was also of course the damaging fact that she was in possession of the missing purse and had been spending money freely. In fact there was little or no moral doubt that she was guilty.

I made

On the other hand there was a good deal to be said for the defense. If the prisoner was guilty, she was evidently a very clever actress, for beyond all question she had made the whole countryside believe in the genuineness of her story; and there was of course the admission of the farmer that he had heard the footsteps of the retreating burglars and fired a shot at them. the very most of this, and though the farmer tried to get out of it by saying that he must have imagined the footsteps, as no doubt he had, I succeeded in convincing the jury, at the end of a hard-fought case, that it would be dangerous to convict, and my client was acquitted. I have only given an imperfect outline of the case. The extraordinary feature of it was the amazing imagination of an uneducated servant girl, and the skillful way in which she built up the details of a story which deceived her master, hood

winked the police, and created a general feeling of uneasiness throughout the country. If she had but left out of her description the mustache and patent leather boots,

probably suspicion would never have been excited against her, and the burglary would have taken its place in the list of crimes beyond the ingenuity of the police to discover.

It was a damage case brought against the city by a lady who, on her way from church one spring morning, had tripped over an obscure encumbrance in the street, and had, in consequence, been practically bedridden for the three years leading up to the trial. She was brought into the court room in a chair and was placed in front of the jury, a pallid, pitiable object, surrounded by her women friends, who acted upon this occasion as nurses, constantly bathing her hands and face with ill-smelling ointments, and administering restoratives, with marked effect upon the jury. Her counsel, Ex-chief Justice Noah Davis, claimed that her spine had been permanently injured, and asked the jury for $50,000 damages. It appeared that Dr. Ranney had been in constant attendance upon the patient ever since the day of her

The Art of

accident. He testified that he had visited her some three hundred times, and had examined her minutely at least two hundred times, in order to make up his mind as to the absolutely correct diagnosis of her case, which he was now thoroughly satisfied was one of genuine disease of the spinal marrow itself. Judge Davis asked him a few preliminary questions, and then gave the doctor his head and let him "turn to the jury and tell them all about it." Dr. Ranney spoke uninterruptedly for nearly three quarters of an hour. He described in detail the sufferings of his patient since she had been under his care; his efforts to relieve her pain; the hopeless nature of her malady. He then proceeded in a most impressive way to picture to the jury the gradual and relentless progress of the disease as it assumed the form of creeping paralysis, involving the destruction of one organ after another until death became a blessed relief. At the close of this recital, without a question more, Judge Davis said in a calm but triumphant tone, "Do you wish to cross-examine?"

Now the point in dispute there was no defense on the merits was the nature of the plaintiff's malady. The city's medical witnesses were unanimous that the lady had not, and could not have, contracted spinal disease from the slight injury she had received. They styled her complaint as "hysterical," existing in the patient's mind alone, and not indicating nor involving a single diseased organ; but the jury evidently all believed Dr. Ranney, and were anxious to render a verdict on his testimony. The cross