Bart felt that this was kind. Wade then remarked that they would find time on Monday to overhaul his law. Later, Bart met Ranney, who, he thought, received him coolly.
The next day the young men went to church. Nothing in the way of heresy found foothold at Jefferson. It was wholly orthodox; although it was suspected that Wade and Ranney had notions of their own in religion; or rather the impression was that they had no religion of any kind. Not to have the one and true, was to have none according to the Jefferson platform.
Monday was an anxious day for Bart. He would now be put to a real test. He knew he had studied hard, but he remembered the air with which Henry and Ranney waived him off. Then he was so poor, and was so anxious to get through, and be admitted in September, that he was a little nervous when the lawyers found leisure in the afternoon to "overhaul his law," as Wade had expressed it.
Ranney had no idea of letting him off on definitions and general rules, and he plunged at once into special pleading, as presented by Chitty, in his chapter on Replications. No severer test could have been applied, and the young men thought it a little rough. Bart answered the questions with some care, and gave the reason of the rules clearly. Ranney then proposed a case of a certain special plea, and asked Bart how he would reply. Bart enumerated all the various replies that might be made, and the method of setting each forth. Ranney then asked him to state an instance of new assignment, in a replication; and when Bart had stated its purpose and given an instance, he said he thought that a good pleader would always so state his case in his declaration as to render a new assignment unnecessary, perhaps impossible. He was then asked what defects in pleading would be cured by a general verdict? and gave the rules quite luminously.
Ranney then asked him what books he had read; and Bart named several.
"What others?" and he named as many more. "Is that all?" laughing.
"Oh!" said Bart, "I remember what you and Henry said about my reading, and really I have dipped into a good many besides."
"Well, Ranney," said Wade, "what can we do for this young man? I think he will pass now, better than one in a hundred."
"I think so too; still, I think we can help him, or help him to help himself." And he finally named a work on commercial law, a book on medical jurisprudence, and a review of Kent. At leisure moments, he would have him practise in drawing bills in Chancery, declarations, pleas, etc.
Bart certainly might be pleased with this result, and it evidently advanced him very much in the estimation of all who had listened to his examination, although he felt that the work imposed upon him was rather slender, and just what he should do with the spare time this labor would leave him he would not then determine.
He liked his new position with these ambitious young men, engaged in intellectual pursuits, with whom he was to associate and live, and upon whom he felt that he had made a favorable impression. It did not occur to him that there might be society, save with these and his books; nor would it have occurred to him to enquire, or to seek entrance into it, if it existed; with a sort of intellectual hunger he rushed upon his books with a feeling that he had recently been dissipated, and misapplied his time and energies.