Lawyers exercise much invention in keeping their clients under control. I recall one recent case where a French chauffeur who had but just arrived in this country was arrested for speeding. The most that could happen to him would, in the natural course of events, be a fine of fifteen or twenty dollars. But an imaginative criminal practitioner got hold of him in the police court and drew such a highly colored picture of what might happen to him that the Frenchman stayed in jail without bail under an assumed name, raised some three hundred dollars by means of a draft on Paris, handed it over to his counsel, and finally after a delay of two weeks was tried in Special Sessions, found guilty, and let go on a suspended sentence. He is now looking for the lawyer with a view to doing something to him that will inevitably result in his own permanent incarceration. Another practical distinction between civil and criminal practitioners is that while the first are concerned for the most part with the law, the second are chiefly occupied with the facts. In civil cases the lawyers spend most of their time in trying to demonstrate that, even assuming their opponents' contentions as to the facts to be true, the law is nevertheless in their own favor. Now, this is a comparatively easy thing, since no one knows what the law in most civil cases is--and it truth it might as well be one way as the other. A noted member of the supreme bench of the United States is reported to have said that when he was chief justice of one of the State courts, and he and his confreres found themselves in a quandary over the law, they were accustomed to send the sergeant- at-arms for what they called the "implements of decision"--a brace of dice and a copper cent. Thus the weightiest matters were decided without difficulty. Now, the taking of a purse out of a lady's reticule does not present much confusion as a legal proposition. It would be somewhat difficult to persuade a judge or a jury that picking a pocket is not a crime. It is far easier to demonstrate that the pocket was not picked at all. This is generally only a question of money. Witnesses can easily be secured to swear either that the lady had no reticule, or that if she had a reticule it contained no purse, or that some person other than the defendant took the purse, or that she herself dropped it, or that even if the prisoner took it he had no criminal intent in so doing, since he observed that it was about to slip from the receptacle in which it was contained and intended but to return it to her. Lastly, if put to it, that in fact the owner was _no lady_, and therefore unworthy of credence.