Every one was damply hot, the examining King's Counsel wiped
the perspiration from his huge, clean-shaven upper lip; and into this
atmosphere of grasping contention and human exhalations the daylight
filtered through a window that was manifestly dirty. The jury sat in a
double pew to the left of the judge, looking as uncomfortable as frogs
that have fallen into an ash-pit, and in the witness-box lied the
would-be omnivorous Dass, under cross-examination....
Holsten had always been accustomed to publish his results so soon as
they appeared to him to be sufficiently advanced to furnish a basis for
further work, and to that confiding disposition and one happy flash of
adaptive invention the alert Dass owed his claim....
But indeed a vast multitude of such sharp people were clutching,
patenting, pre-empting, monopolising this or that feature of the
new development, seeking to subdue this gigantic winged power to the
purposes of their little lusts and avarice. That trial is just one of
innumerable disputes of the same kind. For a time the face of the world
festered with patent legislation. It chanced, however, to have one oddly
dramatic feature in the fact that Holsten, after being kept waiting
about the court for two days as a beggar might have waited at a rich
man's door, after being bullied by ushers and watched by policemen, was
called as a witness, rather severely handled by counsel, and told not to
'quibble' by the judge when he was trying to be absolutely explicit.
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