An Old Lawyer’s Story

I am a very old man now: So old that I work no longer as I used at my profession. The time of rest has come. It is a happy time. I am not poor. I have all life’s luxuries. Best of all, I have a wife who loves me still, and whom I love as well as when I wooed her—nay, better, if that can be, and my children are beautiful and prosperous. What can a man wish more?

I read my favorite authors. I smoke my cigars. I take a glass of wine of an evening. Sometimes we go to a play. Every Sunday morning to church. It is all holiday-time for us. It will not last long. We are both old, but we are happy.

There is no romance about a lawyer’s profession. People are disposed to sneer at it, and to speak of its followers as tricky sort of folks, more anxious for their own gain than that of their neighbors. If this is so, we do not stand alone; but I will say for my brotherhood, that they have hearts as well as other men, and that it is not always merely for what we can make by it that we undertake a cause.

Odd things fall into our way very often. I have had no need to read romances. The real stories that have fallen beneath my notice are quite as interesting, and far more singular, than any tales of the imagination could possibly be. I tell them to my children sometimes on winter evenings.

Perhaps it is only to flatter the old man that they assume an interest in them, nevertheless I will tell one of the tales to you—one which I have always had cause to remember.

A great many years ago, while I was comparatively a young man, and still unmarried, I resided in a certain city in Pennsylvania, and enjoyed the reputation of being the cleverest lawyer ever known there. It is not for me to say the praise was merited, but I found myself able to discover loopholes of escape for those whom I defended, which surprised even my fellow-lawyers. I possessed by nature… Read More