“We threw two leaflets you and I,
To the river as it wandered on,
One was rent and left to die,
The other floated onward all alone.”
An ominous quatrain.
Tom was the name of this sweet-voiced young lover. And Tom was the son of an eminent judge, who has since exchanged the ermine for a crown of glory. Tom was at that time a student of Magdalen College, Oxford. And Jessie, as you know, was the daughter of a Methodist cobbler. Yet they loved all the spring till he went away to the Continent and forgot all about that pleasant spooning.
* * * * *
On the following spring Judge —, his revered parent, went the Oxford Circuit. One day after the Court had risen, he called at his son’s chambers in Magdalen College. There was an affectionate greeting between father and son, and the latter, whom as we have seen, was a most impulsive and kind-hearted young fellow, saw that his father was not looking well.
“You look ill,” he said, in his sweet musical tones. “The pestilential atmosphere of those infernal courts.”
“No. I have been engaged in trying a very sad case.”
Tom smiled incredulously.
“The idea of a judge of your experience affected by anything that transpires in a Court of Justice.”
“And yet so it is.”