re what they professed to be, I will
leave the reader to judge from the following conversation, which took
place between them, one Saturday night, just before closing the store:

'Jacob!'

'Sir?'

'Dit you charge Mr. T---- mit te ham?'

'Yes, father.'

'Vell, so dit I.'

A pause.

'Jacob!'

'Sir?'

'You had petter charge him again, so you won't forget him.'

'Yes, father.

Another pause.

'Jacob!'

'Sir?'

'Now you can water te vinegar, sand te sugar, and close te store, un den
we vill haf family worship, un go ter ped!'

'Yes, father.'

* * * * *

'Law is,' to use the frequent phrase of a Gothamite contemporary, 'a
cu'ros thing;' and not the least curious phase which it presents is the
difference between what people say before juries and what they _think_;
as is fully illustrated in the following, by FRANK HACKETT:

'GRACCHUS,' as the town called him, was a broken-down lawyer, who, as he
got old, had prostituted the talents of his early days to the meanest
kind of pettifogging and rascality. Everybody did their best to keep out
of his clutches, and his 'make up' was seedy enough; yet he managed to
keep in court half a dozen 'cranky suits,' in which, to be sure, he
figured as a party himself, on one side or the other. The circumstances
of one of them, which have just come to our memory, are perhaps worth
jotting down:

For some quarters, GRACCHUS had not paid any rent, and his landlord made
repeated requests of him to move out. Even a promise to cancel all
arrears would not make him stir. A writ of ejectment would have
delighted this 'legal spider;' but Mr. R. knew 'when he was well off,'
and refused to resort to that. ' My dear sir, you _must_ go,' said he
one day, annoyed at the fellow's obstinacy; 'I have a man coming in
right away, who will pay me a good tenant's rent, and I am going to have
the office repaired for him. So just make up your mind to quit this
afternoon.'

As Mr. R. turned to go out, he examined the window nearest him, and
poked his cane through the decayed sash and crumbling glass in two or
three places, with the remark: 'A pretty condition this for a business
man's office to be in!' Nobody was surprised to hear that evening that a
suit had been brought against Mr. R. for damages in trespass.

Mr. R.'s counsel told him that the best thing he could do would be to go
to trial as soon as possible, and if he got out of it with a small sum
for