“My days were spent haranguing special juries of housemaids and laundresses, cross-examining the cook, charging the under-butler, and passing sentence of death upon the pantry boy, who, I may add, was invariably hanged when the court rose.
“If the mutton were overdone, or the turkey burned, I drew up an indictment against old Margaret, and against the kitchen-maid as accomplice, and the family hungered while I harangued; and, in fact, into such disrepute did I bring the legal profession, by the score of annoyance of which I made it the vehicle, that my father got a kind of holy horror of law courts, judges, and crown solicitors, and absented himself from the assizes the same year, for which, being a high sheriff, he paid a penalty of five hundred pounds.
“The next day I was sent off in disgrace to Dublin to begin my career in college, and eat the usual quartos and folios of beef and mutton which qualify a man for the woolsack.
“Years rolled over, in which, after an ineffectual effort to get through college, the only examination I ever got being a jubilee for the king’s birthday, I was at length called to the Irish bar, and saluted by my friends as Counsellor Power. The whole thing was so like a joke to me that it kept me in laughter for three terms; and in fact it was the best thing could happen me, for I had nothing else to do. The hall of the Four Courts was a very pleasant lounge; plenty of agreeable fellows that never earned sixpence or were likely to do so. Then the circuits were so many country excursions, that supplied fun of one kind or other, but no profit. As for me, I was what was called a good junior. I knew how to look after the waiters, to inspect the decanting of the wine and the airing of the claret, and was always attentive to the father of the circuit,—the crossest old villain that ever was a king’s counsel. These eminent qualities, and my being able to sing a song in honor of our own bar, were recommendations enough to make me a favorite, and I was one.
“Now, the reputation I obtained was pleasant enough at first, but I began to wonder that I never got a brief. Somehow, if it rained civil bills or declarations, devil a one would fall upon my head; and it seemed as if the only object I had in life was to accompany the circuit, a kind of deputy-assistant commissary-general, never expected to come into action. To be sure, I was not alone in misfortune; there were several promising youths, who cut great figures in Trinity, in the same predicament, the only difference being, that they attributed to jealousy what I suspected was forgetfulness, for I don’t think a single attorney in Dublin knew one of us.
“Two years passed over, and then I walked the hall with a bag filled with newspapers to look like briefs, and was regularly called by two or three criers from one court to the other. It never took. Even when I used to seduce a country friend to visit the courts, and get him into an animated conversation in a corner between two pillars, devil a one would believe him to be a client, and I was fairly nonplussed.
“‘How is a man ever to distinguish himself in such a walk as this?’ was my eternal question to myself every morning, as I put on my wig. ‘My face is as well known here as Lord Manners’s.’ Every one says, ‘How are you, Dick?’ ‘How goes it, Power?’ But except Holmes, that said one morning as he passed me, ‘Eh, always busy?’ no one alludes to the possibility of my having anything to do.
“‘If I could only get a footing,’ thought I, ‘Lord, how I’d astonish them! As the song says:—
“Perhaps a recruit
Might chance to shoo
Great General Buonaparté.”
So,’ said I to myself, ‘I’ll make these halls ring for it some day or other, if the occasion ever present itself.’ But, faith, it seemed as if some cunning solicitor overheard me and told his associates, for they avoided me like a leprosy. The home circuit I had adopted for some time past, for the very palpable reason that being near town it was least costly, and it had all the advantages of any other for me in getting me nothing to do. Well, one morning we were in Philipstown; I was lying awake in bed, thinking how long it would be before I’d sum up resolution to cut the bar, where certainly my prospects were not the most cheering, when some one tapped gently at my door.