Chamberlin v. White

Citations

• 79 Ill. 549

Syllabus

<p>1. Credit entered on note—right of holder to erase it. While a suit for the collection of a promissory note was pending, a compromise was effected, whereby the plaintiff agreed to give the defendant a credit of §50 on the note if he would pay it on a specified day, which defendant agreed to do; the credit of §50 was indorsed on the note, and the suit dismissed at plaintiff’s costs, according to the agreement. The note was not paid by the defendant on the day specified, and he refused to pay it: Held, that the payee of the note was authorized to erase the §50 credit entered on the note.</p> <p>2. Evidence—exclusion, even when competent, not necessarily cause for reversal of judgment. Where the purchaser of land over which a railroad ran, accepted from the vendor a deed with a reservation of the road bed, and executed a mortgage with a like reservation, and upon the discovery of a mistake in the length of one of the boundary lines in the deed, accepted another deed correcting the mistake but containing the same reservation, in which second deed another mistake in the boundary of the land was afterwards discovered, and a third deed made, with the reservation of the road bed omitted, it was held, in a suit upon a note given for the purchase money of the land, that the acceptance by the purchaser of the two deeds, and giving the mortgage with the reservation in all of them, and his pointing out the mistakes in the two deeds but not intimating that there was any error in the reservation, made the first deed the best evidence in regard to the reservation, and that the testimony of the purchaser, that in his original contract of purchase he did not agree to such reservation, would be entitled to no appreciable weight as against the deed, and, therefore, even if such testimony were admissible, its exclusion could do the defendant no harm, and would be no material error.</p>