Baboo Jabberjee, B.A.

by F. Anstey

(N.B.—I have thought it advisable here and there to translate the legal phraseology into more comprehensible verbiage.)

Now such a claim is to milk a ram, or prendre la lune avec les dents, seeing that I am not a proprietor of even one thousand rupees. Nevertheless (as I have informed Mr Smartle), my progenitor, the Mooktear, will bleed to any reasonable extent of costs out of pocket.

I have held frequent and lengthy interviews with the said Smartle, Esq., who is of incredible despatch and celerity—though I sometimes regret that I did not procure a solicitor of a more senile and sympathetic disposition.

Assuredly had I done so, such an one would not, after perusing my Statement of Defence—a most magnificently voluminous document of over fifty folios, crammed and stuffed with satirical hits and sideblows, and pathetic appeals for the Bench's indulgence, and replete with familiar quotations from best classical and continental authors—such an one, I say, would not have split his sides with disrespectful chucklings, thrown my composition into a wasted paper receptacle, and proceeded to knock off a meagre substitute of his own, containing a very few dry bald paragraphs, in the inadequately brief space of under the hour.

Such, however, was Mr Smartle's course; and the sole consolation is that, owing to his unprofessional precipitation, the action was set down for trial previously to the commencement of the Long Vacation, and my case may come on some time next Term, and I be put out of my misery at the close of the year.

My aforesaid legal adviser, finding that I adhered with the tenacity of bird-slime to my determination to conduct my case in person, did hint in no ambiguous language, that it might perhaps be even better for me to do the guy next November to my native land, and snip my fingers then from a safe distance at the plaintiff.

But it is not my practice to exhibit a white feather (except when prostrated by severe bodily panics), and I am consumed by an ardent impatience to air my fluencies and legal learnedness before the publicity of a London Law Court.

Now, begone dull care! for I am to dismiss all litigious thoughts till October or November next, and become a Dolce far niente, chasing the deer with my heart in the Highlands.

My volunteering acquaintance, by the way, has declined to lend me his rifle, on the transparent pretence that it was contrary to regulations, and that it was not the bon ton to pursue grouse-birds and the like with so war-like a weapon.

So, on young Howard's advice, I made the purchase from a pawnbroker of a lethal instrument, provided with a duplicate bore, so that, should a bird happen by any chance to escape my first barrel, the second will infallibly make him bite the dust.