When a young civilian enters upon the active duties of his profession he is first styled an assistant. Under this description he is the assistant to the magistrate and collector of a particular district. He is vested with certain limited judicial and fiscal authority. He can inflict a small amount of imprisonment, and impose moderate fines in the criminal cases which he tries as assistant magistrate. He may be put in charge of the treasury, and have to deal with sundry matters connected with the land revenue in his capacity of assistant collector. The making or marring of a young assistant sometimes depends not a little on the character of the magistrate-collector under whom he is appointed to serve. The assistant may know a great many things, but when he comes face to face with his actual work in office he finds that he has still very much to learn. He is probably stuffed full of English, Mahomedan, and Hindoo law; he has doubtless passed his examinations in the Oriental languages; but when he takes his seat in court he promptly finds that there is something very wrong. The natives by whom he is surrounded apparently do not understand their own language; they pronounce it so strangely that what they say is not intelligible to him. They certainly fail to understand what he says to them; and as to the legal knowledge with which he expected to astonish them, he finds no opportunity for displaying it. He hears something about an Act—and about duffers—and he suspects that he is being rudely chaffed as a duffer. Now-a-days, relief comes to him usually from one of the native officials in attendance on him, who can speak English, and insinuatingly becomes his interpreter—in fact, his guide, philosopher, and friend. But an assistant is often and ought always to be saved from this abrupt and false position, in entering on his duties, if he will take a little quiet instruction from the magistrate and collector under whom he is to serve. When he joins his district he should first practise anatomy on a few defunct bodies, instead of beginning with vivisection on an actual case. If he will read through the records of a few old decided cases, under the friendly guidance of his magistrate, and in the privacy of his own room, he will soon become master of all the leading technicalities and phraseology of the cases, which he will ordinarily have to decide. He will soon become used to the language of the native officers appointed to attend on him, and will learn to practise his own tongue to the colloquial abbreviations and expressions which differ so widely from the language of the vernacular text-books. Above all things, let him not fear to ask for an explanation of whatever he does not understand, and let him take a note of the explanation given. In after days he will look back at his notes with much satisfaction and amusement at his own quondam ignorance, and he will be the more ready to give help and instruction to the young men who come after him.