Not so many weeks ago I strolled into the old Court of Common Pleas at Westminster, and tried to regather from its mouldering echoes some whisper of the enormous babble which my solitary voice had once awakened there. Quiet sunshine came in through the windows; there was an atmosphere in the place as of one of those little done-with and locked-away graveyards which one comes on unexpectedly in the green nooks of London. It was difficult to reincarnate in fancy from that silent dust the roar and scuffle of a dead generation. Its figures, and the emotions they had once evoked in me, would not be stirred to more than a very shadowy demonstration. They were not, in fact, so much the fallen precipitate of time as of a dead phase of my own existence. Between them and the present lay the verdict of the Court. Only on the hither side of that verdict was life a vivid and strenuous reality to me. Hence, though the case itself, with its judges, and droning counsels, and motley witnesses, and pomp and circumstance of legal warfare, was become as the shadow of a fantasia, every detail of its immediate issues was as clear to me as if it had happened yesterday. The verdict had severed my past from my present self, as a surgeon’s knife cuts away a diseased limb. I could recall the very queer stunned feeling with which I had awakened from the operation amidst the rising buzz and shuffle of the court, or theatre. The solemn withdrawal of the judges--figures like old ermine-muffled dowagers making for their chariots; the yawning and stretching barristers, laughing as they gathered their papers; the excited gossip of the audience; the general movement, and rush of draughts, and gusty wind of cab-hailing voices, loud or indistinct as the doors opened and shut like an organ-swell--it all came back to me like a last week’s harlequinade to a child. Someone takes me by the arm, and leads me out, unresisting, into the mild May evening. A sense as of something rather comical bubbles in me like weak laughter. There is a smell of water carts in the roads, and the unconcerned sparrows are hopping in the intervals of the traffic. “Never mind, old fellow,” says the dear voice in my ear. “You’re the one that comes out of it with credit.” I stop, reeling a little, as if stupidly drunk. “O, credit, Johnny!” I answer, with an inane giggle. “You’ll have to give me that with a vengeance.” “Come, Dicky!” he says, peremptorily for him. “That’s neither sense nor kindness, old man. Nor it isn’t fair to me, you know. I didn’t lead you on to this for my own profit. What I lose is what you lose, and nothing more--faith in men’s justice, that’s all. The rest counts for nothing; and if you’re the friend I believe, you’ll see it as I do.” I may be morally intoxicated. I am not ashamed to own, nevertheless, that, there in the open street, I take his good hand and kiss it.