Exhibit G is the gentlest thing in a locker full of tongue-casts and forged paper, and the defense entered it on purpose. It is one bundle of cattails, folded flat, squared at every corner, recovered exactly as found from the edge of Mrs. Hopkins' pond. There is no crime in it. That is the argument. In a case built on the claim that PeePoo secretly harbors the cold patience to trace a tongue-print seventeen times, the defense offers a bundle of reeds he tidied for a neighbor who never asked, because a frog cannot be two frogs, and this is the frog he actually is.
A frog who folds the cattails when no one is looking is not the frog who signed seventeen checks in the dark.
The detail that makes it evidence rather than decoration is the squaring. Anyone can knock a few reeds into a rough heap. These were folded — flattened along a clean line and corner-matched, the work of someone who could have stopped at 'good enough' and chose 'done properly' instead, for no audience, for no reward, at the edge of someone else's water. Forgery and cattail-folding are, at bottom, the same faculty pointed in opposite directions: both are patient, careful, and unwatched. One patient unwatched frog uses that care to counterfeit a brother. The other uses it to square a neighbor's reeds. Exhibit G shows you which one lives at this pond.
Custody here rests on a witness rather than a lab, and a good one. Mrs. Hopkins has kept the pond next door for fourteen seasons, and she confirms the folding is not a one-time performance staged for a courtroom but a weekly habit — quiet, consistent, and predating the charges by years. The bundle was photographed in place before it was bagged, so the squaring could not be attributed to the officer who collected it. What the file preserves is not a stunt but a pattern: a documented, long-standing, entirely unprofitable decency, logged like any other exhibit and pinned like any other truth.
What Exhibit G proves is disposition, and disposition is the whole quarrel of this case. The prosecution needs a frog who can plan a cruelty and hide it. The defense answers with the smallest possible counter-example that happens to be fatal: a frog who, given a private, unrewarded, unwatched moment, spends it making a neighbor's reeds a little tidier. That is not the psychology of a forger. It never rests. It folds. And a frog who folds the cattails when no one is looking is not the frog who signed seventeen checks in the dark.