But between the back seats and the bench, look for the bar, and if you don’t exactly see the bar, you will the counsel, which is the same thing. Possibly you may hear them—for they are given to talking; to each other, if they have no better resource; but to the jury, or at all events to the judge, if they can find an occasion: some who, curiously enough, have round noses, round eyes, round mouths, and double chins, are sonorous, emphatic, and what we will call portwiney: others are ponderous, slow, chest-speaking men, but these are mostly tall, lank, and coarse-haired, with terrible noses—long, from the bridge downward, and blunt at the point; some, again, of the sharp, acid, suspicious sort—shriek a great deal; while there are a few—great men these—who are so confidential and communicative, that they seem (using a colloquial phrase) to talk to the jury “like a father.” Among the counsel who having nothing to say either for self or client, and who (as I suppose, consequently) amuse themselves with a great deal of light-porter’s work, in carrying fat bags, full of important papers; there are many who make a great show of extracting valuable precedents from thick calf-bound law books, and having neither briefs to study nor motions to make, engage themselves in inditing the obscurest directions for further thick volumes, on the smallest slips of paper procurable, which slips—folded into the semblance of pipe-lights—they, at the hazard of turning illegal summersaults, pass on to the short usher with the bald head. But do not, for one moment, imagine that when you have looked at the judges and the counsel and taken in the general aspect and bearings of the court, that you have at all exhausted its points of interest; on the contrary, the “interest” is all to come. You wish to know what is going on—is it debt or slander? breach of promise or breach of contract? and curiously enough, it is generally the latter. Contracts of all sorts, that are supposed to form a kind of barrier against law, and which, at all events, are held as safeguards or talismans, are mostly the direct road to that monosyllabic mantrap; some people never think of breaking a contract so long as it is merely implied, but reduced to black and white they want to tear a hole in it directly,—indeed, in the sense in which it has been said that all mischief is caused by woman, you will find that every action at law has a “document” lying at the bottom of it—from promissory notes up to architects’ estimates, this will always hold good.