“I must tell you what has happened to me since I came to the country. Do you remember my receiving a very angry, very ill-spelled letter, from a certain Farmer Grimwood of Pegginton, who swore, that if it cost him a thousand guineas in gold he would have the law of _the doctor_--viz. Dr. Leicester--about a tithe of peaches? My father, at my request, was so good as to send for said Grimwood, and to prevent him from having recourse in his ire to Attorney Sharpe. With prodigious difficulty, the angry farmer was restrained till my arrival; when I came home, I found him waiting for me, and literally foaming at the mouth with the furious desire for law. I flatter myself, I did listen to his story with a patience for which Job might have been admired. I was well aware that till he had exhausted himself, and was practically convinced that he had nothing more to say, he would be incapable of listening to me, or to the voice of the angel of peace. When at last absolute fatigue of reiteration had reduced him to silence, when he had held me by the button till he was persuaded he had made me fully master of his case, I prevailed upon him to let me hear what could be said on the opposite side of the question; and after some hours’ cross-examination of six witnesses, repeaters, and reporters, and after an infinite confusion of _said I’s, and said he’s_, it was made clearly to appear that the whole quarrel originated in the mistake of a few words in a message which Dr. Leicester’s agent had given to his son, a boy of seven years old, who had left it with a deaf gate-keeper of seventy-six, who repeated it to Farmer Grimwood, at a moment when the farmer was over-heated and overtired, and consequently prone to _misunderstanding_ and to anger. The most curious circumstance in the whole business is, that the word peaches had never been mentioned by Dr. Leicester’s agent in the original message; and Dr. Leicester really did not know that Mr. Grimwood of Pegginton was possessed of a single peach. Grimwood, though uncommonly obstinate and slow, is a just man; and when I at last brought the facts with indisputable evidence home to his understanding, he acknowledged that he had been too hasty, rejoiced that he had not gone to law, begged the doctor and the doctor’s agent’s pardon, thanked me with his whole honest heart, and went home in perfect charity with all mankind. Mr. Sharpe, who soon heard of the amicable conclusion of this affair, laughs at me, and pronounces that I shall never make a lawyer, and that my friends need never flatter themselves with the notion of my rising at the bar. “Yours truly, “A. PERCY.