Dickens had the same impatience of the heavy sterned brigade and invented his immortal Circumlocution Office, and doubtless genius is entitled to deride these substantial State institutions. Personally, I find them very English and valuable. The more energetic of us may take our pleasure in giving friendly shoves to these heavy sterned Christians, but their inert services to the community are not to be undervalued. But for this immovable official wall who knows what reforms, unnecessary and ill-advised, might have been carried through. If Lord Brougham could have had his way much that I am writing about to-day would long ago have happened. The heavy sterned ones sitting on the lid prevented the opening of the Pandora box with its promises of affliction for the human race in the shape of legal reform. They have left these things over until to-day and brought me amusement for idle vacation hours. At least, let me be thankful to them and sing their praises. I remember when I was planning out these chapters being the victim of a most terrible nightmare. A newspaper with a King's speech in it was thrust before me and every one of the reforms I had already written about was promised to be passed within the Session. I remember smiling in my dream, knowing what parliamentary promises were, and then as I was gliding down the Strand a silent phantom newsboy handed me an evening paper. There it was in black and white, every bill was passed--there was nothing left to write about. I awoke with a cry. It was a terrible shock, and it was some moments of time before I could realise that such a thing was absolutely impossible. And, of course, when you think of the large number of things that you want done and recollect that nothing ever is done that a man really cares about in his own lifetime it was absurd of me, even in a dream, to believe that anything was coming between me and my little book. Indeed, I have hopes that for many years to come it may be regarded as a popular primer about legal reform for future generations who wish to while away idle hours in the luxury of vain imagination. I should like to interest the man in the street about legal reform and to see him at work remedying some of the more obvious of the existing abuses I have referred to, but I am under no delusion that such reforms would bring about the millennium. It is good to do the pressing work in the vineyards on the slopes of the mountain, but it is permissible for poor human man to have his day off now and then to climb on the hilltops and gaze out on the limitless ocean of the future and indulge in wild surmises of the after-world. The remedies of to-day are really tiresome parochial affairs compared to the remedies of to-morrow and hardly seem worth troubling about when one considers that even if you passed them all this year in a century or two your new statutes would be out of date and only fit for the scrap heap.