and likewise the much-prized
device known as a change of venue, when a judge was supposed to be
"prejudiced."

IX.

As my apprenticeship advanced I grew more and more to the inhabitants of
our city into two kinds, the who were served, and the inefficient, who
were separate efficient, neglected; but the mental process of which the
classification was the result was not so deliberate as may be supposed.
Sometimes, when an important client would get into trouble, the affair
took me into the police court, where I saw the riff-raff of the city
penned up, waiting to have justice doled out to them: weary women who
had spent the night in cells, indifferent now as to the front they
presented to the world, the finery rued that they had tended so
carefully to catch the eyes of men on the darkened streets; brazen young
girls, who blazed forth defiance to all order; derelict men, sodden and
hopeless, with scrubby beards; shifty looking burglars and pickpockets.
All these I beheld, at first with twinges of pity, later to mass them
with the ugly and inevitable with whom society had to deal somehow.
Lawyers, after all, must be practical men. I came to know the justices
of these police courts, as well as other judges. And underlying my
acquaintance with all of them was the knowledge--though not on the
threshold of my consciousness--that they depended for their living,
every man of them, those who were appointed and those who were elected,
upon a political organization which derived its sustenance from the
element whence came our clients. Thus by degrees the sense of belonging
to a special priesthood had grown on me.

I recall an experience with that same Mr. Nathan. Weill, the wholesale
grocer of whose commerce with the City Hall my Cousin Robert Breck had
so bitterly complained. Late one afternoon Mr. Weill's carriage ran
over a child on its way up-town through one of the poorer districts. The
parents, naturally, were frantic, and the coachman was arrested. This
was late in the afternoon, and I was alone in the office when the
telephone rang. Hurrying to the police station, I found Mr. Weill in
a state of excitement and abject fear, for an ugly crowd had gathered
outside.

"Could not Mr. Watling or Mr. Fowndes come?" demanded the grocer.

With an inner contempt for the layman's state of mind on such occasions
I assured him of my competency to handle the case. He was impressed, I
think, by the sergeant's deference, who knew