New York was all riot. Mobs gathered at every pretext, and nothing would stop them but bullets or the threat of them. The only subject on which there was even partial agreement was water. The one insurance policy that could be trusted was offered by the Croton Company. The aqueduct would cost only four and a half millions. They said “only” now, for the fire had burned up seventeen millions in a night or two. In April the engineers went out upon the mellowing hills and began to pound stakes again, to re-survey and to wrangle with the landholders. The people of Tarrytown and the other communities met to protest that the taking of their land was unconstitutional, but nothing could check the city’s ruthlessness. The Water Commissioners, unable to buy, were authorized to condemn and to take over at their own appraisement. But the landholders made a hard fight, and some of them brought their claims to RoBards’ office. They found in him a ready warrior, for he understood the spirit that actuated them. Lawyer though he was, RoBards could never keep his own heart out of his cases. If he had been a surgeon he would have suffered every pang that his patients endured; he would have gone frantic with rage against the mysteries of anguish, the incomprehensible, immemorial torture-festival that life has been. He would either have howled blasphemies at his God for his inhumanity, or he would have taken refuge in atheism from the horror of blaming a deity for infinite cruelties, the least of which, if inflicted by a man upon an animal, would have caused his fellowmen to destroy him as a hydrophobic wolf. The law was a like insanity to RoBards. Since it is a condition of human nature that almost every man sees a sacredness in his own rights and a wickedness in every claim that conflicts with his own happiness; and since such rights and wrongs crisscross inextricably and are intertangled in such a Gordian knot as only a sword can solve, it is inevitable that cheap or bitter humorists should continue to find material for easy satire or fierce invective in the lawyers and judges who endeavor to reach peace by compromise. Lawyers can prosper only as doctors do, by stifling their passions and devoting their intellects to their professions as a kind of noble sport. But RoBards was not a sportsman. The suit of Jessamine vs. The City of New York should have been a cold matter of dollars and cents and justice, but nothing has ever been hotter or more passionate than money wars. When RoBards appeared before the Superior Court to secure damages against the city for the ruination of Jessamine’s property, the corporation counsel demurred to his Declaration against the Mayor _et al._ on the ground that the Mayor and the aldermen had statutory authority. The demurrers were sustained. Of course, RoBards appealed to the Court of Errors, and of course it would take eleven years for his case to come up again.