“Quite forgetting the subordinate part I was destined to fill, I opened the case in a most flowery oration, in which I descanted upon the benefits accruing to mankind from water-communication since the days of Noah; remarking upon the antiquity of mills, and especially of millers, and consumed half an hour in a preamble of generalities that I hoped would make a very considerable impression upon the court. Just at the critical moment when I was about to enter more particularly into the case, three or four of the great unbriefed came rattling into my room, and broke in upon the oration. “‘I say, Power,’ said one, ‘come and have an hour’s skating on the canal; the courts are filled, and we sha’n’t be missed.’ “‘Skate, my dear friend,’ said I, in a most dolorous tone, ‘out of the question; see, I am chained to a devilish knotty case with Kinshella and Mills.’ “‘Confound your humbugging,’ said another, ‘that may do very well in Dublin for the attorneys, but not with us.’ “‘I don’t well understand you,’ I replied; ‘there is the brief. Hennesy expects me to report upon it this evening, and I am so hurried.’ “Here a very chorus of laughing broke forth, in which, after several vain efforts to resist, I was forced to join, and kept it up with the others. “When our mirth was over, my friends scrutinized the red-tape-tied packet, and pronounced it a real brief, with a degree of surprise that certainly augured little for their familiarity with such objects of natural history. “When they had left the room, I leisurely examined the all-important document, spreading it out before me upon the table, and surveying it as a newly-anointed sovereign might be supposed to contemplate a map of his dominions. “‘At last,’ said I to myself,--‘at last, and here is the footstep to the woolsack.’ For more than an hour I sat motionless, my eyes fixed upon the outspread paper, lost in a very maze of revery. The ambition which disappointments had crushed, and delay had chilled, came suddenly back, and all my day-dreams of legal success, my cherished aspirations after silk gowns and patents of precedence, rushed once more upon me, and I was resolved to do or die. Alas, a very little reflection showed me that the latter was perfectly practicable; but that, as a junior counsel, five minutes of very common-place recitation was all my province, and with the main business of the day I had about as much to do as the call-boy of a playhouse has with the success of a tragedy.