The Confessions of Artemas Quibble: Being the Ingenuous and Unvarnished History of Artemas Quibble, Esquire, One-Time Practitioner in the New York Criminal Courts, Together with an Account of the Divers Wiles, Tricks, Sophistries, Technicalities, and Sundry Artifices of Himself and Others of the Fraternity, Commonly Yclept "Shysters" or "Shyster Lawyers"Train, Arthur Cheney
General
The Confessions of Artemas Quibble: Being the Ingenuous and Unvarnished History of Artemas Quibble, Esquire, One-Time Practitioner in the New York Criminal Courts, Together with an Account of the Divers Wiles, Tricks, Sophistries, Technicalities, and Sundry Artifices of Himself and Others of the Fraternity, Commonly Yclept "Shysters" or "Shyster Lawyers"
Train, Arthur Cheney
Attorney and client -- Fiction; Legal stories; New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction
Nothing more would occur for a couple of weeks, during which the
clerk would hold the watch pending its owner's return, little
suspecting what was going on meantime. Levine, having "landed"
his watch, immediately swore to a verified complaint in an action
at law for "goods sold and delivered," setting forth on the date
in question he had sold--not to the clerk, but to his _employer_--
a gold watch for the sum of fifty dollars, which the latter had
then and there promised to pay for at once. The complaint further
recited that the money had been duly demanded and payment refused,
and asked judgment for fifty dollars and the costs and disbursements
of the action. Levine would then procure from some irresponsible
person an affidavit that the latter had personally served a copy
of the complaint in question, together with a summons, upon the
defendant, and place the case on the calendar for trial. Of course
no papers were in fact served upon anybody and Levine would in due
course secure judgment by default for sixty-odd dollars. Armed
with a certified copy of the judgment and a writ of attachment,
and accompanied by a burly deputy marshal selected for the ferocity
of his appearance, Levine would wait until some opportune time when
the owner of the shop was again absent and the shop had been left
in charge of the same clerk or a member of the family. Bursting
roughly in, he would demand whether or not it was the intention of
the owner to pay the judgment, while at the same moment the deputy
would levy on the stock in trade.
The owner of the shop, having been hastily summoned, would return
to demand angrily what the rumpus was all about. By this time the
clerk would have recovered his wits sufficiently to denounce the
proceeding as an outrage and the suit as baseless. But his master,
who saw judgment against himself for sixty dollars and his goods
actually under attachment, was usually in no mood to listen to,
much less believe, his clerk's explanations. At all events, they
availed naught, when Levine, with an expression of horror at such
deliberate mendacity on the part of the clerk, was wont to say:
"Ask him, pray, whether he has not got the watch in his pocket at
this very moment!"
Usually this was indeed the fact, as the clerk had no idea what
else to do with it until Levine should return.
"So-ho!" his master would shout wrathfully. "What do you mean by
saying that you did not agree to buy the watch? Why, you have kept
it all the time! What's more, you've pretended to buy it in my
name! And now my shop is turned into a bear garden and there is
a judgment against me and my goods are attached! A fine result of
your extravagance!"
"But I never agreed to buy it!" insists the clerk. "This man left
it here on approval!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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