Lovers will listen to sweethearts when husbands turn blandly deaf to wives, and young Aaron accepts the advice of his goddess of faded years and experiences. He hunts up a certain Judge Patterson, a law-light of New Jersey—not too far from Paramus—and enters himself as a student under that philosopher of jurisprudence.
Judge Patterson and young Aaron do not agree. The one is methodical, and looks slowly out upon the world; he holds by the respectable theory that one should know the law before he practices it. The other favors haste at any cost, and argues that by practice one will most surely and sharply come to a profound knowledge of the law.
Perceiving his studies to go forward as though shod with lead, young Aaron remonstrates with his preceptor.
“This will never do,” he cries. “Sir, I shall be gray before I go to the bar!” He explains that it is his purpose to enter upon the practice of the law within a year. “Twelve months as a student should be enough,” he says.
“Sir,” observes the scandalized Judge Patterson in retort, “to talk of taking charge of a client’s interests after studying but a year is to talk of fraud. You would but sacrifice them to your own vain ignorance, sir. It would be a most flagrant case of the blind leading the blind.”
“Possibly now,” urges young Aaron the cynical, “the opposing counsel might be as blind as I, and the bench as blind as either.”
“Such talk is profanation!” exclaims Judge Patterson who, making a cult of the law, feels a priestly horror at young Aaron’s ribaldry. “Let me be plain, sir! No student shall leave me to engage upon the practice, unless I think him competent. As to that condition of competency, I deem you many months’ journey from it.”
Finding himself and Judge Patterson so much at variance, young Aaron bids that severe jurist adieu, and betakes himself to Haverstraw. There he makes a more agreeable compact with one Judge Smith, whom the English have driven from New York. While he waits for the day when—English vanished—he may return to his practice, Judge Smith accepts a round sum in gold from young Aaron, on the understanding that he devote himself wholly to that impatient gentleman’s education.
Judge Smith of Haverstraw does his honest best to earn that gold. Morning, noon, and night, and late into the latter, he and young Aaron go hammering at the old musty masters of jurisprudence. The student makes astonishing advances, and it is no more than a matter of weeks when Jack proves as good as his master. Still, the sentiment which animates young Aaron’s efforts is never high. He studies law as some folk study fencing, his one absorbing thought being to learn how to defeat an adversary and save himself. His great concern is to make himself past master of every thrust, parry, and sleighty trick of fence, whether in attack or guard, with the one object of victory for himself and the enemy’s destruction. Justice, and to assist thereat, is the thing distant from his thoughts.
At the end of six months, Judge Smith declares young Aaron able to hold his own with any adversary.