ARGUMENT OF lION._ HENRY L_ STONE.



distinguished relatives to surround him, with no educational advan-
tages. he spent the first fourteen years of his life. He was not born
upon some estate in the bluegrass region, bearing some aristocratic
name, as the plaintiff says he was. He cannot boast a long line of
ancestry, but he is of poor and honest parents.  He was not even
blessed with the early love and training of a mother, who died while
he was an infant in her arms. This untutored boy we find in the new
county of Rowan, at Morehead, in 1856, toiling in the Valley of the
Triplett, upon his father's farm, among the rocks and the pines of that
sterile region. On court occasions he -was engaged waiting upon his
father's guests, blacking their boots or currying, watering, and feeding
their horses. On one occasion, graphically described by Charlton H.
Ashton (who in after years by the force od circumstances became his
warm and ardent friend), while seated in the porch at his father's
hotel, being up there on a fishing excursion, Ashton saw some young
man coming up the road driving an ox team. He drove it around in
front of the porch, and he asked Col. Hargis who that was. He made
him the answer: " It is my son Tom."  Ashton says the young man
had on brown jeans pants, ragged and torn, and rolled up to the knees,
no coat, bare-footed, in his shirt sleeves, with a broad-brimmed straw hat
on his head, much worn. He was apparently about seventeen years of
age, and much freckled. That is the way that the defendant first pre-
sented himself to Charlton H. Ashton. My friend, Mr. Larew, says
that there is nothing remarkable in the history of the defendant, that
he was like other mountain bovs. Mr. Larew has not traveled the
same road with the defendant. He does not appreciate the fact that
the defendant is a self-made man, and when he undertook upon the
cross-examination of Mr. Ashton, to bring this touching picture of
the early life of Judge Hargis into contempt and ridicule, he only
increased a sympathy which is natural in the bosom of every one.
Mr. Larew asked: "Why, Mr. Ashton, how did I appear to you
when you first saw me," and Ashton describes my friend Mr. Larew
dressed in a black cloth suit, walking up the streets of Flemingsburg,
I believe, with a rattan cane in his hand, and a cigar in his mouth, on
his road to some convention, perhaps, whose nominee he afterwards
refused to support.
  Thus the defendant struggled on until i86o, obtaining what little
education he could in the log school-houses of that locality and time,
taking up the profession of the law, reading law books irregularly. until
in September, i86i, he joined the Confederate Army, leaving a three
months' school half-taught out, that he had undertaken to teach a few
miles above Morehead. As to his career during the war we know from
the evidence this much at least-that he went into the army as a pri-
vate soldier, and came out as a captain. He was in a department where
fighting had to be done, and at the close of the war, as late as July
14th, i865, he rcached home, having been released from prison upon
Johnson's Island. This much we know from the record, and when
counsel go out of the record for the purpose of smirching the honor-
able conduct of the defendant during the late war, they are upon for-
bidden ground. When counsel undertake to testify in their speeches
where they were during the war, let them look out that their own mil
itary records are clean. Go ask the commanding officers of Judge
Hargis, go ask his comrades whether he was a brave and honorable sol-



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