l beds--all say a
tick-tock. Behind the arrangements of words, confusion strikes a posture
of guilt, strikes a posture of innocence. God Himself were a dolt to
interfere. For if the song of the angels is somehow other than the
tick-tock of men, the song of the angels is a music for heaven and the
tick-tock of men is a restful drone in which the city hides the
mysteries non-essential to the progress and pattern of its streets.

CHAPTER III

In and out of the crowded courtrooms of the city George Hazlitt pursued
his career. Buried in the babble of words, his voice sounded from day to
day with a firm, self-conscious vigor. To the thousand and one droners
about him, the law was a remunerative game in which one matched
platitude with bromide, legal precedent of the State of Illinois with
legal precedent of the State of Indiana; in which right and wrong were a
shuffle of words and the wages of sin dependent upon the depth of a
counselor's wits.

There was in Hazlitt, however, a puritanical fervor which withstood the
lure of expediency. He entered the courts not to juggle with words,
fence for loopholes out of which to drag dubious acquittals for his
clients. His profession was a part of his nature. He saw it as a battle
ground on which, under the babbling and droning, good and evil stood at
unending grips. Good always triumphing. Evil always going to jail
despite habeas corpuses, writs, and duces tecums.

To question the nobility of the Hazlitt soul would be a sidestepping.
There were among his friends, men of dubious integrity with elastic
scruples and pliable consciences. But skepticism thrust in vain at the
Hazlitt armor. In him had been authentically born the mania for
conformity. He was a prosecutor by birth. Against that which did not
conform, against all that squirmed for some expression beyond the
tick-tock of life, he was a force--an apostle with a sword. Men
pretending virtues as relentless as his own were often inclined to eye
him askance. Virtue breeds skepticism among the virtuous. But there was
a difference about Hazlitt.

The basis of his philosophy was twofold. It embraced a rage against
dreamers and a rage against lawbreakers. Lawbreakers were men and women
who sacrificed the welfare and safety of the many for the sating of
their individual greeds and lusts. He viewed the activities of
lawbreakers with a sense of personal outrage. He, Hazlitt, was a part of
society--a conscious unit of a state o