He’s mistaken the place,
His books of devotion to sell:
He should learn, once for all,
That he’ll never get call
For the sale of his Bibles in hell.
Had the above jeu d’esprit been the impromptu of a beaten client, he would have got great credit for it; and in truth, I think, after a year or two of litigation in a court of justice, most clients would freely subscribe their names to the concluding epithet.
Another jeu d’esprit I remember, and so no doubt do all the bar of my standing who have any recollection left,—of whom, however, there is, I fancy, no great number.
There is a very broad and boisterous ferry between the counties of Wicklow and Wexford, called Ballinlaw, which the Leinster bar, on circuit, were obliged to cross in a bad boat. At times the wind was extremely violent between the hills, the waters high, and the passage dangerous;—yet the briefs were at the other side; and many a nervous barrister, who on a simple journey would have rode a high-trotting horse fifty miles round-about rather than cross Ballinlaw when the waves were in an angry humour, yet, being sure that there was a golden mine, and a phalanx of attorneys brandishing their white briefs on the opposite shore—commending himself to Divine Providence, and flinging his saddle-bags into the boat—has stepped in after them; and if he had any prayers or curses by heart, now and then pronounced a fragment of such in rotation as were most familiar to him, on launching into an element which he never drank and had a rooted aversion to be upset in.
The curious colloquy of a boatman, on one of those boisterous passages, with Counsellor Cæsar Colclough, once amused such of the passengers as had not the fear of death before their eyes.
Cæsar Colclough of Duffry Hall, a very eccentric, quiet character, not overwise, (he was afterward Chief Justice of Newfoundland,) was in the boat during a storm. Getting nervous, he could not restrain his piety, and began to lisp out, “O Lord!—O Lord!” breathing an ardent prayer that he might once more see his own house, Duffry Hall, in safety, and taste a sweet barn-door fowl or duck, of which he had fine breeds.