and reassuring legend, “Money to Loan at 6 per cent.” There were not many interruptions at first, but after a while, when I had been appointed as attorney to a humane society, there were times when I had to lay my manuscripts aside. I felt it to be, in a way, my duty to long for such interruptions, but they usually came just at those times when I was most absorbed in my manuscript, so that their welcome, while affectedly polite, was not wholly from the heart. One of these intrusions resulted in a long trial before a justice of the peace; it was a case that grew out of a neighborhood quarrel, and all the inhabitants of the _locus in quo_ were subpœnaed as witnesses. Such a case of course always affords an opportunity to study human nature; but this one, too, had the effect ultimately of bringing in many clients--and, as Altgeld had said, by way of advice to me, got people in the habit of coming to my office. Those witnesses acquired that habit, and since human nature seemed to run pretty high in that neighborhood most of the time, they got into a good deal of trouble; they were most of them so poor that they seldom got into anything else, unless it were the jail or the workhouse, and some of them were always ready to help send others of them to those places. Out of the long file of poor miserable creatures there emerged one day that Maria R---- of whom I spoke. She was a buxom young German emigrant, not long over from Pomerania, and her fair skin and yellow hair, and a certain manner she had, marked her out from all the rest. She came with her children one morning to complain of her husband’s neglect of them; and to her, as to the whole body of society which thinks no more deeply than she did, it seemed the necessary, proper, and even indispensable thing to put Rheinhold--that was her husband’s name--in jail (You should have heard her speak the name Rheinhold, with that delicious note in which she _grasséyéd_ her r’s.) There she sat, on the little chair by the window, with her stupidly staring boy and girl at her knees, but in her arms the brightest, prettiest, flaxen-haired baby in the world, a little elf who was always smiling, and picking at her mother’s nose or cheeks with her fat little fingers, and when she smiled, her mother smiled, too; it was the only time she ever did. Rheinhold of course drank; he “mistreated” his children--that is, he did not buy them food. And since the Humane Society was organized and maintained for the explicit purpose of forcing people to be humane, even though it had to be inhumane to accomplish its purpose, the duty of its attorney was clear.