By Advice of Counsel

by Arthur Cheney Train

"It's about a camel," explained the subordinate hesitatingly.

The D.A. grinned. Said he: "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a just prosecutor to convict a Syrian of murder. Well, old top, send for a couple of dozen Korans and hire rooms for the jury over Kaydoub, Salone & Dabut's and turn 'em loose on kibbah arnabeiah, kashtah and halawee."

Mr. William Montague Pepperill was a very intense young person, twenty-six years old, out of Boston by Harvard College. He had been born beneath the golden dome of the State House on Beacon Street, and from the windows of the Pepperill mansion his infant eyes had gazed smugly down upon the Mall and Frog Pond of the historic Common. There had been an aloof serenity about his life within the bulging front of the paternal residence with its ancient glass window panes—faintly tinged with blue, just as the blood in the Pepperill veins was also faintly tinged with the same color—his unimpeachable social position at Hoppy's and later on at Harvard—which he pronounced Haavaad—and the profound respect in which he was held at the law school in Cambridge, that gave Mr. W. Montague Pepperill a certain confidence in the impeccability of himself, his family, his relatives, his friends, his college, his habiliments and haberdashery, his deportment, and his opinions, political, religious and otherwise.

For W.M.P. the only real Americans lived on Beacon Hill, though a few perhaps might be found accidentally across Charles Street upon the made land of the Back Bay. A real American must necessarily also be a graduate of Harvard, a Unitarian, an allopath, belong to the Somerset Club and date back ancestrally at least to King Philip's War. W. Montague had, however, decided early in life that Boston was too small for him and that he owed a duty to the rest of the country.

So he had condescended to New York, where through his real American connections in law, finance and business he had landed a job in a political office where the aristocrats were all either Irish, Jews or Italians, who regarded him as an outlandish animal. It had been a strange experience for him. So had the discovery that graft, blackmail, corruption, vice and crime were not mere literary conventions, existing only for the theoretical purposes of novelists and playwrights, but were actualities frequently dealt with in metropolitan society. He had secured his appointment from a reform administration and he had been retained as a holdover by Peckham, the new district attorney, by reason of the fact that his uncle by marriage was a Wall Street banker who contributed liberally without prejudice to both political parties. This, however, W.M.P. did not know, and assumed that he was allowed to keep his four-thousand-dollar salary because the county could not get on without him. He was slender, wore a mouse-colored waistcoat, fawn tie and spats, and plastered his hair neatly down on each side of a glossy cranium that was an almost perfect sphere.

"Ah! Mr. William Montague Pepperill, I believe?" inquired Mr. Tutt with profound politeness from the doorway of W.M.P.'s cubicle, which looked into the gloomy light shaft of the Criminal Courts Building.

Mr. Pepperill finished what he was writing and then looked up.

"Yes," he replied. "What can I do for you?"

He did not ask Mr. Tutt his name or invite him to sit down.

The old lawyer smiled. He liked young men, even conceited young men; they were so enthusiastic, so confident, so uncompromising. Besides, W.M.P. was at heart, as Mr. Tutt perceived, a high-class sort of chap. So he smiled.