This led several of my customers to conspire to frighten me into paying them large sums as hush money, pretending that I had secured their purchases under false pretenses; but the Yankee spirit of our fathers, "millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute," prompted me to defy their infamous demands. Under the lead of a fiendishly "smart" lawyer, they declared that I told them their lands were full of phosphate, and within city limits, although my published circulars and maps stated nothing of the kind. They denounced me as a fraud in the newspapers, brought lawsuits against me, attached property, and proceeded in a most brutal manner to compel payment of their unjust claims. My word for half a century had everywhere been as good as my bond, and my bond as good as gold. I had never before had a lawsuit or any trouble with any one, and so in my inexperience I employed a lawyer friend, who was no match for my enemies' human tiger. They testified unfairly in court, and after many crushing annoyances from the law's delays, my lawyer, putting in no defense, in order, as he said, to save his ammunition for use in the Superior Court, to which he appealed, they secured judgment. All these slanders broke my never firm health; I was soon on the verge of nervous prostration, and was ordered by my physician to at once secure a change of climate to save my life. My innocent lawyer supposed that a court of justice would postpone my trial until my return; but we have now some "courts of injustice." Some lawyers are worse than highway robbers; they make the laws as legislators to suit their own iniquitous, selfish purposes, so worded that they are susceptible of almost any interpretation, thus leading to endless litigations by which these cannibal devourers of reputations are robbing the public of their possessions. They employ spies to stir up strife, and some lawyers and judges seem to be banded together to fleece the confiding lambs of the public. The judge not only refused to postpone the trial until I was able to attend, but refused to have the jury informed that I was absent on account of serious sickness. We are bound hand and foot, the slaves of these law-sharks, and it seems as if nothing but revolution and the banishing of these tyrants, will ever deliver the public from the worse than African slavery to which some lawyers subject us. We have seen innocent, modest lady witnesses subjected to bull-dozing and abuse by barbarous lawyers, until they suffered tortures to which those of the Spanish Inquisition were merciful. As I was obliged to go or die, I accepted the offer of my wife's brother, a member of the publishing firm of Webster's Dictionaries, and went to California to fight their battles against the new Standard Dictionary which was rapidly driving the Webster books out of the markets of the entire Pacific slope.