Now, an account stated is a distinct cause of action. This was very pointedly decided by the Court of Appeal in Grundy v. Townsend[6], where it was held that the admission of a debt made in the City of London gave, on acceptance by suit, jurisdiction to the Mayor's Court, when the original obligation was outside that jurisdiction. And, because it is a distinct cause of action, Mr. Parsons contended that that was sufficient to oust the Statute. But I cannot go so far as that. An account stated may be a mere admission of a debt, merely evidence of it, to which, in the circumstances, the law attaches a promise to pay. In such a case the obligation as to the old debt remains unaltered, and the account stated, though a new ground of action, is not conclusive or exclusive (Fidgett v. Penny[7] and Perry v. Attwood[8]). And then the Statute of Limitations applies, as it does here to the first claim made even though the account, if stated, was for valuable consideration, provided it was a mere promise to pay the old debt at a future time. But an account stated may be something quite different. It may, as Lord Blackburn (when Blackburn J.) said in Laycock v. Pickles[9], be "a real account stated, called in old law an insimul computassent, that is to say, when several items of claim are brought into account on either side, and, being set against one another, a balance is struck, and the consideration for the payment of the balance is the discharge of the items on each side. It is then the same as if each item was paid and a discharge given for each, and in consideration of that discharge the balance was agreed to be due." Now, no doubt, he says it is as if payment had been made, but the point is that the constructive payment is referred to only as the reason for the constructive discharge; and then it is in consideration of the discharge that the new balance is agreed to be paid. That balance supported by new valuable consideration is a new obligation, entirely superseding the old. To use the language of Rolfe B. in Ashby v. James[10], "it is a transaction between the parties, out of which a new consideration arises for a promise to pay the balance." And it is not what Alderson B., in the same case, calls "a mere parol statement of, and promise to pay, an existing debt" which, as he observes, would not take the case out of the Statute "because to hold otherwise would be to repeal the Statute." Now, if that be the principle, it has to be seen whether the interview of June 1912 was merely - even though for valuable consideration - an arrangement to admit an existing debt, coupled with a binding agreement to give time to pay it until January 1913, or was a bargain for valuable consideration to place everything on a new footing, to supersede the old debt entirely and to create a new obligation, namely, to pay the price of goods already delivered taken as at the entered amounts, and interest as claimed, the period of payment of this new debt being fixed at January 1913. In that case it would resemble in principle the case of Helps v. Winterbottom[11]. In the first alternative, the plaintiff fails because the evidence is inadmissible or insufficient in law; in the second the plaintiff succeeds, so far as the Statute is concerned, because the bargain, though oral, is not offered as evidence of the original cause of action to which alone the Statute applied, but to a cause of action not only new but entirely independent, the former one having ceased to exist. Which of these two alternatives should prevail it is, of course, beyond my province to say or even suggest. I can only say that on the evidence before us it is not legally impossible to find either: whichever on the new evidence to be given appears the more probable and more reasonable will be for the tribunal of fact to determine for itself. Our duty is simply to say that it is on present materials open to adopt either, and therefore the nonsuit was wrong and the appeal should be dismissed.