as only enough for one, it was decided that I should be put in
what is called a 'learned profession,' and let push my fortune. 'Take
your choice, Dick,' said my father, with a most benign smile,--'take your
choice, boy: will you be a lawyer, a parson, or a doctor?'

"Had he said, 'Will you be put in the stocks, the pillory, or publicly
whipped?' I could not have looked more blank than at the question.

"As a decent Protestant, he should have grudged me to the Church; as a
philanthropist, he might have scrupled at making me a physician; but as he
had lost deeply by law-suits, there looked something very like a lurking
malice in sending me to the bar. Now, so far, I concurred with him; for
having no gift for enduring either sermons or senna, I thought I'd make a
bad administrator of either, and as I was ever regarded in the family as
rather of a shrewd and quick turn, with a very natural taste for roguery, I
began to believe he was right, and that Nature intended me for the circuit.

"From the hour my vocation was pronounced, it had been happy for the family
that they could have got rid of me. A certain ambition to rise in my
profession laid hold on me, and I meditated all day and night how I was to
get on. Every trick, every subtle invention to cheat the enemy that I could
read of, I treasured up carefully, being fully impressed with the notion
that roguery meant law, and equity was only another name for odd and even.

"My days were spent haranguing special juries of housemaids and
laundresses, cross-examining the cook, charging the under-butler, and
passing sentence of death upon the pantry boy, who, I may add, was
invariably hanged when the court rose.

"If the mutton were overdone, or the turkey burned, I drew up an indictment
against old Margaret, and against the kitchen-maid as accomplice, and the
family hungered while I harangued; and, in fact, into such disrepute did I
bring the legal profession, by the score of annoyance of which I made
it the vehicle, that my father got a kind of holy horror of law courts,
judges, and crown solicitors, and absented himself from the assizes the
same year, for which, being a high sheriff, he paid a penalty of five
hundred pounds.

"The next day I was sent off in disgrace to Dublin to begin my career in
college, and eat the usual quartos and folios of beef and mutton which
qualify a man for the woolsack.

"Years rolled over, in which, after an ineffectual effort to get through