e came to trial at the old
Dutch-English town of New Castle, and from the magnitude of the damages
claimed, the weight and number of counsel, and the novelty of trying a
great corporation, it interested the lawyers and burdened the
newspapers, and was popularly supposed to belong to the class of French
spoliation claims, or squaring-the-circle problems--something that would
be going on at the final end of the world.

"Never you mind, Bob Frame! Walter Jones is a great advocate, but, Goy!
he don't know a Delaware jury. I'll get my country-seat, up here on the
New Castle hills, out of this case," Clayton said, as he pitched quoits
with his fellow-lawyers from Washington and Philadelphia, on the green
battery where the Philadelphia steamer came in with the Southern
passengers for the little stone-silled railroad.

John Randel, Jr., had ruined a fine engineer, to become a litigious man
all his life.

He sued his successor and fellow New-Yorker, Engineer Wright, and was
nonsuited. He garnisheed the canal officers, and beset the Legislature
for remedial legislation, and threatened Clayton himself with damages;
yet had such a fund of experience and such vitality that he kept the
outer public beaten up, like the driving of wild beasts into the circle
of the hunters. He had surveyed the great city of New York and planned
its streets above the new City Hall. Elevated railroads were his
projection half a century before they came about. He now looked upon
engineering with indifference, and considered himself to have been born
for the law.

In the midst of many other duties, Clayton, in course of time, convicted
Whitecar of kidnapping, on negro testimony, having obtained a ruling to
that end from his cousin, the chief-justice; and a constituent named
Sorden (_not_ the personage of our tale), being prosecuted for
kidnapping, in order to spite Clayton, was cleared by him at Georgetown
after a marvellous exhibition of jury eloquence, and repaid the
obligation, years after our story closes, by breaking a party dead-lock
in the Legislature of Delaware, where he became a member, and sending
Mr. Clayton for the fourth time to the American senate.

* * * * *

The Entailed Hat became more common in the streets of Annapolis than it
had been in Princess Anne, as Milburn pressed his bill for assistance
year after year, and was shot through the back with slanders from home
and hustled in front by overwhelmin