THE audience in the court-room arose and remained standing until the judge in his black silk robe had entered and taken his place on the bench. Then the audience resumed its seat, and the clerk began to read the proceedings for the previous day. The ceremony attendant upon the sitting of the Circuit Court of the United States carried with it an impressive sense of majestic, imperial authority, and an air of grave, judicial deliberation. It was the Government of the United States of America, the spirit of supreme order and law moving through its servant, and, next to the Great Ruler of Events, it was greatest. It had assumed for the good of men the right to sit in judgment, and to say wherein lay the justice of their complicated quarrels. Before it, every man's cause was of equal import, and every man was of equal stature; bond or free, one stood before it naked of influence, and with his shoulder made as high as the shoulder of his fellow. This is the theory. If it fails, it is because the law at best is but a human device, and its servants, after all, are but men like the others. The building in which the Federal Court held its session was a substantial, handsome structure, and maintained a strange contrast to the town in which it stood. The town was rough, miserable, uncouth; the temporary habitation of men, struggling ever with the relentless _ananke_ of things; in equal contrast to the officers of this court was the audience in the great court-room. They were the pioneers of civilization; a motley crowd in which the best and worst of human society was mixed and intermixed. They were, for the most part, bronzed, bearded, fearless examples of the inexorable law of the survival of the fittest, but not all. Some were the reckless advance agents of those hardy vices that follow close in the wake of empire,--devils too villainous to be tolerated in the cities of the East, and too bold and too wary to be stamped out by the deliberate machinery of the law. Against these the officers of the court bore some evidence of polish. They were exact, calculating men, bred to respect order, and obey and maintain the customs of law. The contrast was significant, and one recalled and understood the constant bitter conflict between the judicial tribunals of the State and the judicial tribunals of the Federal Government, bitterly waged and as yet undecided. From one standpoint, this was the calm tribunal of the supreme power of the land, providing the same rights and remedies on the very border of its jurisdiction that it provided at the capital itself, favoring no condition and acting as even-eyed as nature.