Under date of June 18, 1877, Garfield writes "You know that my life has abounded in crises and difficult situations. This trip has been, perhaps, not a crisis, but certainly has placed me in a position of extreme difficulty. Two or three months ago, W.B. Duncan, a prominent business man in New York, retained me as his lawyer in a suit to be heard in the United States Court in Mobile, and sent me the papers in the case. I studied them, and found that they involved an important and somewhat difficult question of law, and I made myself sufficiently familiar with it, so that when Duncan telegraphed me to be in Mobile on the first Monday in June, I went with a pretty comfortable sense of my readiness to meet anybody who should be employed on the other side. But when I reached Mobile, I found there were two other suits connected, with this, and involving the ownership, sale, and complicated rights of several parties to the Mobile and Ohio Railroad. "After two days' skirmishing, the court ordered the three suits to be consolidated. The question I had prepared myself on passed wholly out of sight, and the whole entanglement of an insolvent railroad, twenty-five years old, and lying across four States, and costing $20,000,000, came upon us at once. There were seven lawyers in the case besides me. On one side were John A. Campbell, of New Orleans, late member of the Supreme Bench of the United States; a leading New York and a Mobile lawyer. Against us were Judge Hoadley, of Cincinnati, and several Southern men. I was assigned the duty of summing up the case for our side, and answering the final argument of the opposition. I have never felt myself in such danger of failure before, all had so much better knowledge of the facts than I, and all had more experience with that class of litigation? but I am very sure no one of them did so much hard work, in the five nights and six days of the trial, as I did. I am glad to tell you that I have received a dispatch from Mobile, that the court adopted my view of the case, and gave us a verdict on all points." Who can doubt, after reading of these two cases, that had Garfield devoted himself to the practice of the law exclusively, he would have made one of the most successful members of the profession in the country, perhaps risen to the highest rank? As it was, he was only able to devote the time he could spare from his legislative labors. These increased as years sped. On the retirement of James G. Blaine from the lower House of Congress, the leadership of his party devolved upon Garfield. It was a post of honor, but it imposed upon him a vast amount of labor. He must qualify himself to speak, not superficially, but from adequate knowledge upon all points of legislation, and to defend the party with which he was allied from all attacks of political opponents.