"It was a piping hot day in August, and Harrisville at its worst. Whenever a vehicle passed, clouds of dust floated in at the windows and settled upon my books, my papers, and covered my green baize table with an infinitesimal section of H---- County real estate. Even the slumberer on the sofa was not exempt. His usually ruddy face had become ashen, and his snoring was developing into a series of choking gasps. It was fearful, this dust,--alkaline, penetrating, stifling,--and from such soil the raw-boned, hard-featured men of H---- wrung a living. And I, sharing their narrow lives, began to understand the true significance of the word 'onery' as applied to us by our more prosperous and ofttimes just exasperated neighbors. "It was court day, and I had just come in after a stiff tussle with a pig-headed judge, an irritating opposing counsel, and a H---- County jury. I thought of old Uncle Peter Whitehead, 'The onriest critters in the whole State of Illinoy come out o' H----! Thar ain't no tellin' which way an H---- County jury's a goin' to jump. The law and the facts ain't nothin' ter them, it's jest the way they are feelin' that particler day and minnit. If so happen they got outer bed the wrong foot furrard that mornin', then it's good-by ter the pris'ner, and hell fer the lawyer that's defendin' him!' "Court had adjourned until two o'clock, leaving the fate of my client undecided, and I came into my office, tired-out, warm, and exceedingly anxious. Clearing Thad Hawley meant a great deal to me just then. It was my first important case, and I felt that my future would be decided in a great measure by its outcome. If the twelve stolid farmers upon whom I had showered my eloquence went Fraley-ward in their verdict, I knew that my professional goose would be cooked, and visions of a move to some distant bailiwick rose up before me. Fraley and Hicks would then monopolize the Harrisville practice, and perhaps in a year or so some other fledgling would rise up in his ignorance and be as ruthlessly cut down as I had been.