'Jacob!'

'Sir?'

'Now you can water te vinegar, sand te sugar, and close te store, un den we vill haf family worship, un go ter ped!'

'Yes, father.'

'Law is,' to use the frequent phrase of a Gothamite contemporary, 'a cu'ros thing;' and not the least curious phase which it presents is the difference between what people say before juries and what they think; as is fully illustrated in the following, by Frank Hackett:

'Gracchus,' as the town called him, was a broken-down lawyer, who, as he got old, had prostituted the talents of his early days to the meanest kind of pettifogging and rascality. Everybody did their best to keep out of his clutches, and his 'make up' was seedy enough; yet he managed to keep in court half a dozen 'cranky suits,' in which, to be sure, he figured as a party himself, on one side or the other. The circumstances of one of them, which have just come to our memory, are perhaps worth jotting down:

For some quarters, Gracchus had not paid any rent, and his landlord made repeated requests of him to move out. Even a promise to cancel all arrears would not make him stir. A writ of ejectment would have delighted this 'legal spider;' but Mr. R. knew 'when he was well off,' and refused to resort to that. ' My dear sir, you must go,' said he one day, annoyed at the fellow's obstinacy; 'I have a man coming in right away, who will pay me a good tenant's rent, and I am going to have the office repaired for him. So just make up your mind to quit this afternoon.'

As Mr. R. turned to go out, he examined the window nearest him, and poked his cane through the decayed sash and crumbling glass in two or three places, with the remark: 'A pretty condition this for a business man's office to be in!' Nobody was surprised to hear that evening that a suit had been brought against Mr. R. for damages in trespass.

Mr. R.'s counsel told him that the best thing he could do would be to go to trial as soon as possible, and if he got out of it with a small sum for damages and no further annoyance, he would be lucky. Gracchus had secured 'Squire Sweet to argue the case to the jury—probably 'on shares.' To hear Sweet 'warm up' before the panel, you would have sworn that the 'palladium of justice' and the other 'fixtures' had their salvation staked on the success of his client. And if there was anything he thought himself competent to 'operate largely' on, it was a damage suit. On this occasion, the vivid picture he drew of an unwarrantable intrusion upon this aged and indefatigable servant of the public, the injury inflicted upon his 'valuable health,' and his generous conduct in contenting himself with the paltry sum of eighty dollars by way of damages, was to be set down as the 'Squire's best effort.