public street have shot down a man against
whom he had not the slightest grudge as that twenty commonplace
citizens should be mistaken as to what they had seen. Whether they
were aided in reaching a verdict by "the implements of decision"
I do not know, but in the end they found my client guilty and in
due course he paid the penalty, as many another king has done, upon
the scaffold. The plain fact was that The King was a "bravo," who
took a childish and vain pride in killing people. He killed for
the love of killing, or rather for the egotistic satisfaction of
being talked of as a killer. At any rate, there are many like him.
While his defence was unsuccessful, he came near enough to escaping
to point out the value of a bold denial in a criminal case.

Our clients consisted, for the most part, of three clearly defined
classes of persons: Criminals, their victims, and persons involved
in marital or quasi-marital difficulties. These last furnished by
far the most interesting quota of our business, and, did not
professional confidence seal my lips, I could recount numerous
entertaining anecdotes concerning some of what are usually regarded
as New York's most respectable, not to say straight-laced, households.
A family skeleton is the criminal lawyer's strongest ally. Once
you can locate him and drag him forth you have but to rattle his
bones ever so little and the paternal bank account is at your mercy.
New York is prolific of skeletons of this generic character, and
Gottlieb had a magnificent collection. When naught else was doing
we used to stir them up and revive business. Over this feature of
the firm's activities I feel obliged, however, from a natural
feeling of delicacy, to draw a veil. Our function usually consisted
in offering to see to it that a certain proposed action, based on
certain injudicious letters, should be discontinued upon the payment
of a certain specified sum of money. These sums ranged in amount
from five to twenty thousand dollars, of which we retained only
one-half. I understand that some lawyers make more than this
percentage, but for such I have only contempt. A member of a
learned and honorable profession should be scrupulous in his conduct,
and to keep for one's self more than half the money recovered for
a client seems to me to be bordering on the unethical. But perhaps
I am hypersqueamish.

Of course we had a great deal of the ordinary "knock-down-and-drag-
out" variety of