Among the stream of callers that filled up the afternoon was an old gentleman, whom, but for the half-modernized clothes, one might have taken for Dr. Franklin, as he is shown in the marble statue at the Capitol. The countenance had the same strong cast; the thin gray locks hung down, long, over the straight, collarless Quaker coat in the same way; the broad-brimmed hat, the cane, the general aspect of venerable but hearty old age, were all as we have them in the statue. This was Jacob Barker,[29] a Northern Quaker, whose term of residence in New Orleans counts further back than the lives of most of her citizens, and who had, nevertheless, apparently passed the prime of a prosperous business career before he emigrated to the South. Mr. Barker is now between eighty and ninety years of age. He has many ships carrying his trade to foreign and domestic ports. His children approach old age around him, and yet he may be seen almost every day, during business hours, behind the counter, in his old-fashioned little bank on Camp Street, counting money and waiting on customers, like a bank clerk of twenty. Long ago Mr. Barker sympathized with the generous views of his sect on the sinfulness of slavery. It is even of record that he joined a party once in New York harbor, which steamed out in one of his own tug-boats to a vessel about to sail for Charleston, and rescued a runaway slave she was to carry back to his South Carolina owner. How Southern business has molded Northern consciences may be seen in the fact that, for a generation past, Mr. Barker has been as Southern in his views as the majority of the depositors in his bank; and, indeed, it seems scarcely known in a Rebel community, whose highest confidence he enjoys, that so devoted a Southern politician is not, after all, a Southern man. We were joined at dinner by three gentlemen who might be taken as conspicuous representatives of the Southern bar, as well as of diverse phases of Southern Unionism. The eldest, a fine old gentleman, whose youthful spirits and ruddy face perpetually contradict the story of his thin gray hairs, is generally held to be the finest civil lawyer here, which is equivalent to pronouncing him the finest civil lawyer in the United States.[30] As long ago as during the administration of General Jackson, his prominence was such that, when it was plausibly argued that a vacancy on the Supreme Bench ought to be so filled as to give that tribunal of last resort at least one Judge learned in the civil law, Mr. Roselius was at once suggested. New Orleans lawyers still tell that he might have had the place if he would; but that the emoluments of the bar are here too great to be exchanged for the honorable beggary of the Supreme Court.