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Official report of the trial of Henry Ward Beecher
Official report of the trial of Henry Ward Beecher Author:Theodore Tilton Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: was served he had left for New Hampshire; and the counsel knows (if he knows anything about the Revised Statutes) that there is a most special and complicated pr... more »ovision of law, with regard to the mode of verifying affidavits outside of this State. I am bound to believe he does not know it, jndging from conversations which he has caused to be reported; but I say there is a most technical provision, and we had to send three times before we could get the verification in the form prescribed by law. On the day after receiving the complaint, we mailed the answer to our client in New Hampshire. He went, on the day after receiving it, seventeen miles to find an officer before whom he could verify it. That officer forwarded the paper for attestation to the wrong official. We sent it back ; and this time it was certified by the proper officer, but in wrong form. We sent it a third time, and I personally superintended the matter in the White Mountains, to get it right. Of course we, as attorneys, might have verified the answer; but we did not propose to give the enemies of our client an opportunity to charge him with evading the responsibility of a denial under his own oath. Mr. Tracy.—Since this argument has been in progress, my attention has been called to a case in this court of a similar character, in which one of your associates has settled the rule chat even where an application has been made to make the complaint more definite and certain, and that is granted, the court will not then on the trial confine the plaintiff to the particular allega, lions in the complaint, but will allow them to travel outside. If that is the rule of this court, it makes it still more important to grant our application here, requiring them to give us a bill of particulars in which they shall state the ti...« less