lf for the Bench by improving
upon the proverbial attribute of justice. He was not only blind but
deaf. For something like forty-five years he had walked the hall of the
Four Courts with an empty bag, and a head scarcely more encumbered, when
one morning--no one could guess why--the "Gazette" announced that
the Lord Lieutenant had appointed him to the vacant chairmanship
of Westmeath,--a promotion which had the effect of confounding all
political animosity by its perfect unaccountableness.

It is a law of Nature that nothing ever goes to loss. Bad wine will make
very tolerable vinegar; spoiled hay is converted into good manure; and
so, a very middling lawyer often drops down into a very respectable
judge. Had the gods but acknowledged Mr. Ball's abilities some years
earlier, doubtless he had been an exception to the theory.

They waited, however, so long that both sight and hearing were in
abeyance when the promotion came. It seemed to rally him, however, this
act of recognition, although late. It was a kind of corroboration of the
self-estimate of a long life, and he prepared to show the world that he
was very different from what they took him for. No men have the bump
of self-esteem like lawyers; they live, and grow old, and die, always
fancying that Holts, and Hales, and Mansfields are hid within the
unostentatious exterior of their dusty garments; and that the wit that
dazzles, and the pathos that thrills, are all rusting inside, just
for want of a little of that cheering encouragement by which their
contemporaries are clad in silk and walk in high places. Snow Ball was
determined to show the world its error, and with a smart frock and green
spectacles he took the field like a "fine old Irish barrister," with
many a dry joke or sly sarcasm curled up in the wrinkles beside his
mouth. However cheap a man may be held by his fellows in the "Hall,"
he is always sure of a compensation in the provinces. There the country
gentlemen looked upon their chairman as a Blackstone,--not alone
a storehouse of law, but a great appeal upon questions of general
knowledge and information. I should scarcely have ventured upon what
some of my readers may regard as a mere digression, if it were not that
the gentleman and the peculiar nature of his infirmities had led to an
intimate relation with my father. My parent's fondness for law, and all
appertaining to it, had attached him to the little inn where Mr. Ball
usually put up at each se