ifference. The men painted as they spoke--with certainty. The
club indulges in revelries which it calls "jinks"--high and low, at
intervals--and each of these gatherings is faithfully portrayed in
oils by hands that know their business. In this club were no amateurs
spoiling canvas, because they fancied they could handle oils without
knowledge of shadows or anatomy--no gentleman of leisure ruining the
temper of publishers and an already ruined market with attempts to write
"because everybody writes something these days."

My hosts were working, or had worked for their daily bread with pen or
paint, and their talk for the most part was of the shop--shoppy--that is
to say, delightful. They extended a large hand of welcome, and were as
brethren, and I did homage to the owl and listened to their talk. An
Indian club about Christmas-time will yield, if properly worked, an
abundant harvest of queer tales; but at a gathering of Americans
from the uttermost ends of their own continent, the tales are larger,
thicker, more spinous, and even more azure than any Indian variety.
Tales of the war I heard told by an ex-officer of the South over his
evening drink to a colonel of the Northern army, my introducer, who had
served as a trooper in the Northern Horse, throwing in emendations from
time to time. "Tales of the Law," which in this country is an amazingly
elastic affair, followed from the lips of a judge. Forgive me for
recording one tale that struck me as new. It may interest the up-country
Bar in India.

Once upon a time there was Samuelson, a young lawyer, who feared not
God, neither regarded the Bench. (Name, age, and town of the man were
given at great length.) To him no case had ever come as a client, partly
because he lived in a district where lynch law prevailed, and partly
because the most desperate prisoner shrunk from intrusting himself to
the mercies of a phenomenal stammerer. But in time there happened an
aggravated murder--so bad, indeed, that by common consent the citizens
decided, as a prelude to lynching, to give the real law a chance. They
could, in fact, gambol round that murder. They met--the court in its
shirt-sleeves--and against the raw square of the Court House window a
temptingly suggestive branch of a tree fretted the sky. No one appeared
for the prisoner, and, partly in jest, the court advised young Samuelson
to take up the case.

"The prisoner is undefended, Sam," said the court. "The square thing to