The Devitt Will Case

Talking of curious bits of practice in civil courts, reminds me of a sharp stroke of Glendenning’s, a good many years ago. You know Glendenning?—a wiry, nervous little fellow, who worked his way up at the Philadelphia bar, without any influence but sheer brain force. But as for brains, there was keen, wide awake power enough in that bullet-head of his to cut a way through any muddle the law could make.

As for that Devitt Will Case, he always gave me credit in that—which was fair enough, in one sense; but what’s the good of all the truth which can be ferreted out in a case, unless the lawyer puts it properly to a thick-skulled jury? And you see, Mr. Glendenning knew how to put it; I furnished the nail, if you will, but he drove it homo. Drove it, and clinched it, too.

The way of it was this:—to go back a bit. I had been in the special detective force about six years, and was beginning to feel the ground pretty firm under my feet, as one might say, (with a secure salary, and having laid by a snug sum for a rainy day,) when I bought the house we live in now, out on Green Hill. Ground was cheap there, then; the new streets were but lately laid out, and their way was clogged up by old-fashioned, country-looking houses, with rough fences about them, and others of the same build, but a poorer sort, which rented low, by the quarter or half-year, to mechanics, whose work was down in the city.

In one of these, about a square from the pretentious row of three-storied bricks, where we lived, there was a family named Fitch—an old schoolmaster—his wife, and two or three orphan grandchildren. Fitch, it was said, was a fine scholar; but his learning had done nothing better for him than to get him a place as under teacher in one of the public schools, where he was poorly paid, and more miserably used. Winter or summer afternoons, in the short hour between school-time and dark, you would always… Read More