Perhaps the Inns of Court may still shelter a few married ladies, who either from love of old-world ways, or from stern necessity, consent to dwell in their husbands' chambers. If such ladies can at the present time be found, the writer of this page would look for them in Gray's Inn--that straggling caravansary for the reception of money-lenders, Bohemians, and eccentric gentlemen--rather than in the other three Inns of Court, which have undoubtedly quite lost their old population of lady-residents. But from those three hospices the last of the ladies must have retreated at a comparatively recent date. Fifteen years since, when the writer of this book was a beardless undergraduate, he had the honor of knowing some married ladies, of good family and unblemished repute, who lived with their husbands in the Middle Temple. One of those ladies--the daughter of a country magistrate, the sister of a distinguished classic scholar--was the wife of a common law barrister who now holds a judicial appointment in one of our colonies. The women of her old home circle occasionally called on this young wife: but as they could not reach her quarters in Sycamore Court without attracting much unpleasant observation, their visits were not frequent. Living in a barrack of unwed men, that charming girl was surrounded by honest fellows who would have resented as an insult to themselves an impertinence offered to her. Still her life was abnormal, unnatural, deleterious; it was felt by all who cared for her that she ought not to be where she was; and when an appointment with a good income in a healthy and thriving colony was offered to her husband, all who knew her, and many who had never spoken to her, rejoiced at the intelligence. At the present time, in the far distant country which looks up to her as a personage of importance, this lady--not less exemplary as wife and mother than brilliant as a woman of society--takes pleasure in recalling the days when she was a prisoner in the Temple. One of the last cases of married life in the Temple, that came before the public notice, was that of a barrister and his wife who incurred obloquy and punishment for their brutal conduct to a poor servant girl. No one would thank the writer for re-publishing the details of that nauseous illustration of the degradation to which it is possible for a gentleman and scholar to sink. But, however revolting, the case is not without interest for the reader who is curious about the social life of the Temple.