remarkable that neither of the members of a high-class law
firm in New York City should ever have been in a police court, but such
a situation is by no means infrequent. The county or small-town attorney
knows his business from the ground up. He starts with assault and
battery, petty larceny and collection cases and gradually works his way
up, so to speak, to murder and corporate reorganizations. But in Wall
Street the young student whose ambition is to appear before the Supreme
Court of the United States in some constitutional matter as soon as
possible is apt to spend his early years in brief writing and then
become a specialist in real estate, corporation, admiralty or probate
law and perhaps never see the inside of a trial court at all, much less
a police court, which, to the poor and ignorant, at any rate, is the
most important court of any of them, since it is here that the citizen
must go to enforce his everyday rights.

Mr. Wilfred Edgerton suspected that a magistrate's court was a dirty
sort of hole, full of brawling shyster lawyers, and he didn't want to
know any more about such places than he could help. Theoretically he was
aware that on a proper complaint sworn to by a person supposing himself
or herself criminally aggrieved the judge would issue a warrant to an
officer, who would execute it on the person of the criminal and hale him
or her to jail. The idea of Mrs. Wells being dragged shrieking down
Fifth Avenue or being carted away from her house in a Black Maria filled
him with dismay.

Yet that was what Mrs. Pumpelly proposed to have done, and unfortunately
he had to do exactly what Mrs. Pumpelly said; quickly too.

"Maddox," he called to a timid youth in a green eye-shade sitting in
lonely grandeur in the spacious library, "just run up to
the--er--magistrate's court on Blank Street and ascertain the proper
procedure for punishing a person for obstructing the highway. If you
find an appropriate statute or ordinance you may lay an information
against Mrs. Rutherford Wells for violating it this afternoon in front
of the residence next to hers; and see that the proper process issues in
the regular way."

To hear him one would have thought he did things like that daily before
breakfast--such is the effect of legal jargon.

"Yes, sir," answered Maddox respectfully, making a note. "Do you wish to
have the warrant held or executed?"

Mr. Wilfred Edgerton bit his mustache doubtfully.

"We-ell," he answe