That peculiar form of human activity, or inactivity, known as getting a law practice, has been so abundantly treated on the printed page that I have not the temerity to add to the literature on the interesting subject. The experience is never dramatic, even if it is sometimes tragic, and it is so often tragic that there has seemed no other recourse for mankind than, by one of those tacit understandings on which our race gets through life, to view it as a comedy. It is no comedy, of course, to the chief actor, who is sustained only by his dreams, his illusions, and his ideals, and he may count himself successful perhaps, if, when he has lost his illusions, he can retain at least some of his ideals, though the law is too apt to strip him of both. However that may be, in my own experience in that sort there was an incident which made its peculiar impressions; indeed, there were several such incidents, but the one which I have in mind involves the perhaps commonplace story of Maria R----, which ran like a serial during those trying years. I had intended to take up the practice of law in Chicago; I was quite certain that there I should set up my little enterprise, and this self-same certainty is perhaps the reason why I found myself back in Toledo, in a lonely little office in one of the new office buildings; sky-scrapers they were called in the new sense of metropolitan life that then began to pervade the town; they were not so very high, but they seemed high enough to scrape the low skies which arch so many of the grey days in the lake region. It was as long ago, I believe, as the time of Pythagoras that the law of the certain uncertainty of certainty was deduced for the humbling of human pride, and when my certainties with regard to Chicago proved all to be broken reeds, there were more gray days in that region of the intemperate zone than the meteorological records show. The little law office had a portrait of William Dean Howells on its walls, and in time the portraits of other writers, differing from those other law offices which prefer to be adorned with pictures of Chief Justice Marshall--a strong man, of course, who wrote some strong fiction, too, in his day--and of Hamilton and of Jefferson, indicating either a catholicity or a confusion of principle on the part of the occupying proprietor, of which usually he is not himself aware. There were a few law-books, too, and on the desk a little digest of the law of evidence as affected by the decisions of the Ohio courts. I had the noble intention of mastering it, but I did not read in it very much, since for a long while there was no one to pay me for doing so, and I spent most of my hours at my desk over a manuscript of “The 13th District,” a novel of politics I was then writing, looking up now and then and gazing out of the window at the blank rear walls of certain brick buildings which made a dreary prospect, even if one of them did bear, as I well remember, the bright