“He cherished his friend, and he relished a bumper, Yet one fault he had, and that one was a thumper— Then what was his failing? come, tell it, add burn ye, He was, could he help it? a special attorney.” Goldsmith’s Retaliation. The female readers of these rambling chapters have already been considering—no doubt—how some kind of a plot may be divined from the foregoing hints; but this arises from a total misconception of my plan. Blessed ladies! toward whom, as viewed in imagination, my heart warms, and live coals stir among the hoary embers, I write not a romance or even a story. These are reminiscences, memorandums, odd leaves torn from the volume of recollection. Thanks to the modern way of publishing by piece-meal, my fair critics cannot be cheated of the _agrodolce_ of the denouement by any perverse brother or nephew peeping into the last pages, and forestalling the catastrophe. No, the winding-up is not to be preposterously revealed. This were as disappointing as for a chemist to see some grand discovery which he longs for printed in the daily sheet before his investigations are half done. You remember Montaigne’s story of the ancient philosopher and the dish of figs which had been laid in honey. Bent on learning, and not a little conceited in regard to my small and fragmentary acquisitions, I rode about the county in search of some congenial characters, and certainly I alighted on some odd ones. The straggling village around our court-house comprised a church, a school, a doctor’s house and laboratory, a store, several mechanics’ shops, and two lawyers’ offices. In one of the last mentioned lived Gideon Stowe. Rumor says that Stowe was the son of an overseer; but he was in my day a man of wide-spread reputation at the bar. A strong savor of his plebeianism adhered to him, which he rather cherished than concealed. I see him now, a strong-built man of fifty or thereabout; large-headed, bald and glabrous on the crown, with curly gray-hair gathered around his thick neck. He wore blue broad-cloth, and a white neck-cloth, and his low shoes displayed the blue yarn stockings, which covered a sturdy leg even in summer. Of the graces he made small account. All dignity but that of sinewy argumentation he held far beneath him. I have seen him sit for hours on a court-day, on the counter of the country store, with his feet dangling, as he whittled off pecks of splinters and shavings from a bludgeon of soft pine, as he discoursed on constitutional law to the group who listened and admired. Stowe was the resort of desperate culprits, for an hundred miles around. He loved plantation-talk, was a thriving agriculturist, a wealthy man, and the father of numerous accomplished daughters. If the English of the highway was in any case stronger than the dialect of books he seized on it, as Cobbet used to do.