“Beattie tells me that this attack has inserted another life in my lease,” said he; “and I am glad of it. It is right that the men who speculated on my death should be reminded of the uncertainty of life by the negative proof. It is well, too, that there should be men long-lived enough to bridge over periods of mediocrity, and connect the triumphs of the past with the coming glories of the future. We are surely not destined to a perpetuity of Pendletons and Fitzgibbons?” It was thus he discoursed to an old legal comrade,--who, less gifted and less fortunate, still wore his stuff gown, and pleaded for the outer bar,--poor old Billy Haire, the dreariest advocate, and one of the honestest fellows that ever carried his bag into court. While nearly all of his contemporaries had risen to rank and eminence, Billy toiled on through life with small success, liked by his friends, respected by the world, but the terror of attorneys, who only saw in him the type of adverse decisions and unfavorable verdicts. For forty-odd years had he lived a life that any but himself would have deemed martyrdom,--his law laughed at, his eloquence ridiculed, his manner mimicked, jeered at by the bench, quizzed by the bar, sneered at by the newspapers, every absurd story tagged to his name, every stupid blunder fathered on him, till at last, as it were, by the mere force of years, the world came to recognize the incomparable temper that no provocation had ever been able to irritate, the grand nature that rose above all resentment, and would think better of its fellows than these moods of spiteful wit or impertinent drollery might seem to entitle them to. The old Judge liked him; he liked his manly simplicity of character, his truthfulness, and his honesty; but perhaps more than all these, did he like his dulness. It was so pleasant to him to pelt this poor heavy man with smart epigrams and pungent sarcasms on all that was doing in the world, and see the hopeless effort he made to follow him. Billy, too, had another use; he alone, of all the Chief Baron's friends, could tell him what was the current gossip of the hall,--what men thought, or at least what they said of him. The genuine simplicity of Haire's nature gave to his revelations a character so devoid of all spitefulness,--it was so evident that, in repeating, he never identified himself with his story that Lendrick would listen to words from him that, coming from another, his resentment would have repelled with indignation. “And you tell me that the story now is, my whole attack was nothing but temper?” said the old Judge, as the two men walked slowly up and down on the grass lawn before the door. “Not that exactly; but they say that constitutional irritability had much to say to it.” “It was, in fact, such a seizure as, with a man like yourself, would have been a mere nothing.” “Perhaps so.” “I am sure of it, sir; and what more do they say?”