There was, of course, Adelle. Her uncle had been her legal guardian and as such had intended to sell her interest in the Field for a pittance. The lawyers assumed that her aunt would be appointed by the probate court to the empty honor of guardianship. Otherwise they regarded her, as everybody always did, as entirely negligible. And she so regarded herself. The lawyers were prompt in having the guardianship question brought up in the probate court for settlement first. It was introduced there as a motion early in the fall term of court, the papers being presented to the judge by the junior member of the distinguished firm of B---- lawyers, Bright, Seagrove, and Bright. Any other judge, probably, would have scribbled his initials then and there upon the printed application for guardianship,--the affair being in charge of such eminent counsel,--and there must have been an end altogether to Adelle's expectations and of this story. That was what the lawyers naturally expected. But this judge, after a hasty glance or two at the application, took the matter under advisement. "Of course the old boy had to sleep upon it!" young Bright reported to the senior members of the firm. The lawyers of B---- were accustomed to make fun of Judge Orcutt or grumble about his ways of doing things. He was certainly different from the ordinary run of probate judges or of all judges for that matter. The smart law firms that had dealings with him professed to consider him a poor lawyer, but everybody knows that eminent lawyers usually have a poor opinion of the ability of judges. They reason that if the judges had their ability, they would not be poorly paid judges, but holding out their baskets for the fat fruit falling abundantly from the corporation trees. It should be said that the law was not Judge Orcutt's first love: probably was not his supreme mistress at any time. Perhaps for that very reason he made a better probate judge--a more human judge--than any of the smart lawyers could have made. The little gray-haired judge was a poet, and not an unpublished poet. I will not stop to pass judgment on those thin volumes of verse, elegantly printed and bound, that from time to time appeared in the welter of modern literature with the judge's name. The judge was fonder of them, no doubt, and perhaps prouder of them than Bright, Seagrove, and Bright are of their large retainers. And I believe that the published volumes of verse, and the unprinted ones within his heart and brain, made Judge Orcutt an altogether sounder judge than if he had mused in his idle hours upon the law or upon corporation fees. He was one of those rare judges, who even after twenty years of forms--motions and pleas and precedents--could never wholly forget the individual human being behind the legal form.