9OLP BILL SMITH, THE SILENT HUNTER. 217 
“This must not be so while I have a crust. Children must 
not starve in such a country as this!’ So saying, he took the 
child gently in his arms, and bore it into his house, where his 
good old wife immediately took the dying orphan to her 
bosom, and soon warmed it into life again; but with the 
utmost exercise of her matronly skill, it was several days 
before the exhausted little one could recover strength enough 
to give any coherent account of himself. 
Judge Campbell knew old Saunders well, and when he 
heard the boy’s straight-forward story, he had every reason to 
believe that it was true, every word of it. In the meantime , 
he had got up a great interest in this little waif and estray, 
which it had pleased Providence to cast in his path; and as 
the old couple had no children, but two daughters who were 
married and comfortably settled, they finally determined to 
submit to what seemed like a requisition upon them by the 
Father of all on behalf of the fatherless, and adopted little 
Smith into their family as a son. 
The Circuits were some of them very large at that time, as 
was especially the case with that of Judge Campbell’s. Soon 
after this event he started on his round, and what was his 
inexpressible delight to find the first case on the docket, in 
the county which had the honor of owning old ‘Saunders for 
a citizen, marked “ Commonwealth vs. Samuel Saunders, for 
abducting, murdering, or otherwise unlawfully making away 
with an indentured male child, known as William Smith,” 
&e. &e. 
The old man could scarcely contain his gravity upon the 
bench. He immediately ordered up the case—ruled down all 
quibbling attempts to obtain a postponement—and it was the 
general remark among the lawyers, that the usually lenient 
Judge was more severe and harsh this term than they had 
ever known him to be before in twenty years upon the bench. 
The case came on. “The Judge compelled the minutest 
scrutiny of all the facts, and a most damning case was made 
