An amusing piece of good fortune happened to me at the beginning of my service. I was placed, as I said, on the Committee on the Revision of the Laws. My law practice had been in the interior of the Commonwealth. So I had little knowledge of United States jurisprudence. I determined in order to fit myself for my new duties to make a careful study of the statutes and law administered in the United States Courts. I took with me to Washington a complete set of the Reports of the Supreme Court of the United States and purchased Abbott's Digest of those decisions, then just published. The first evening after I got settled I spent in reading the opinions of the Supreme Court. I took the Digest beginning with the letter A, reading the abstracts, and then reading the cases referred to. I got as far as Adm and read the cases relating to admiralty practice. The next morning the Speaker announced his Committees and the House adjourned. After the adjournment, Judge Poland, Chairman of the Committee on the Revision of the Laws, called the Committee together and laid before them a letter he had just received from Mr. Justice Miller of the Supreme Court, asking for a change in the law in regard to monitions for summoning defendants in Admiralty. The change had been made necessary by some recent decisions of the Court. The other members of the Committee looked at each other in dismay. None of them was familiar with the question, or knew at all what it was all about. I then stated to them the difficulty, giving them the names of the cases and the volumes where they were found. They were all quite astonished to find a man from the country, of whom probably none of them had ever heard before, having the law of Admiralty at his tongue's end. If the question had related to anything in the Digest under Adr, or anything thereafter, I should have been found probably more ignorant than they were. But Judge Poland took me into high favor, and I found his friendship exceedingly agreeable and valuable. I do not remember that the Committee on the Revision of the Laws had another meeting while I belonged to it.