“The nearest I ever came to a downright row was with Mr. William Pinkney. Mr. Pinkney was the acknowledged head and leader of the American bar. He was the great practitioner at Washington when I was admitted to practice in the courts there. I found Mr. Pinkney by universal concession the very head of the bar—a lawyer of extraordinary accomplishments and withal a very wonderful man. But with all that there was something about him that was very small. He did things that one would hardly think it possible that a gentleman of his breeding and culture and great weight as a lawyer could do. “He was a very vain man. One saw it in every motion he made. When he came into court he was dressed in the very extreme of fashion—almost like a dandy. He would wear into the court-room his white gloves that had been put on fresh that morning and that he never put on again. He usually rode from his house to the Capitol on horseback, and his overalls were taken off and given to his servant who attended him. Pinkney showed in his whole appearance that he considered himself the great man of that arena, and that he expected deference to be paid to him as the acknowledged leader of the bar. He had a great many satellites—men of course much less eminent than himself at the bar—who flattered him, and employed him to take their briefs and argue their cases, they doing the work and he receiving the greatest share of the pay. That was the position that Mr. Pinkney occupied when I entered the bar at Washington. “I was a lawyer who had my living to get, and I felt that although I should not argue my cases as well as he could, still, if my clients employed me they should have the best ability I had to give them, and I should do the work myself. I did not propose to practice law in the Supreme Court by proxy. I think that in some pretty important cases I had Mr. Pinkney rather expected that I should fall into the current of his admirers and share my fees with him. This I utterly refused to do.