ghts to mar the current of my
happiness. There was my name in conjunction with the two mighty leaders on
the circuit; and though they each pocketed a hundred, I doubt very much if
they received their briefs with one half the satisfaction. My joy at length
a little subdued, I opened the roll of paper and began carefully to peruse
about fifty pages of narrative regarding a watercourse that once had turned
a mill; but, from some reasons doubtless known to itself or its friends,
would do so no longer, and thus set two respectable neighbors at
loggerheads, and involved them in a record that had been now heard three
several times.

"Quite forgetting the subordinate part I was destined to fill, I opened
the case in a most flowery oration, in which I descanted upon the benefits
accruing to mankind from water-communication since the days of Noah;
remarking upon the antiquity of mills, and especially of millers, and
consumed half an hour in a preamble of generalities that I hoped would make
a very considerable impression upon the court. Just at the critical moment
when I was about to enter more particularly into the case, three or four
of the great unbriefed came rattling into my room, and broke in upon the
oration.

"'I say, Power,' said one, 'come and have an hour's skating on the canal;
the courts are filled, and we sha'n't be missed.'

"'Skate, my dear friend,' said I, in a most dolorous tone, 'out of the
question; see, I am chained to a devilish knotty case with Kinshella and
Mills.'

"'Confound your humbugging,' said another, 'that may do very well in Dublin
for the attorneys, but not with us.'

"'I don't well understand you,' I replied; 'there is the brief. Hennesy
expects me to report upon it this evening, and I am so hurried.'

"Here a very chorus of laughing broke forth, in which, after several vain
efforts to resist, I was forced to join, and kept it up with the others.

"When our mirth was over, my friends scrutinized the red-tape-tied packet,
and pronounced it a real brief, with a degree of surprise that certainly
augured little for their familiarity with such objects of natural history.

"When they had left the room, I leisurely examined the all-important
document, spreading it out before me upon the table, and surveying it as
a newly-anointed sovereign might be supposed to contemplate a map of his
dominions.

"'At last,' said I to myself,--'at last, and here is the footstep to the
woolsack.' For more than