e years go
by--five--and he finds that he is still doing the same thing. He is now
a member of the bar, he has become the managing clerk, he attends to
fairly important matters, engages the office force, superintends
transfer of title, occasionally argues a motion. Five years more go by
and perhaps his salary is raised a trifle more. Then one day he awakes
to the realization that his future is to be only that of a trusted
servitor.

Perchance he is married and has a baby. The time has come for him to
choose whether he will go forth and put his fortune to the test "to win
or lose it all" or settle down into the position of faithful legal hired
man. He is getting a bit bald, he has had one or two tussles with his
bank about accidental overdrafts. The world looks pretty bleak outside
and the big machine of the law goes grinding on heartless, inevitable.
Who is he to challenge the future? The old job is fairly easy; they
can't get on without him, they say; here is where he belongs; he knows
his business--give him his thirty-five hundred a year and let him stay!

That is Binks, or Calkins, or Shivers, or any one of those worried
gray-haired men who sit in the outer office behind a desk strewn with
papers and make sure that no mistakes have been made. To them every
doubtful question of practise is referred and they answer
instantly--sometimes wrongly, but always instantly. They know the last
day for serving the demurrer in Bilbank against Terwilliger and whether
or not you can tax a referee's fee as a disbursement in a bill of costs;
they are experts on the precise form for orders in matrimonial actions
and the rule in regard to filing a summons and complaint in Oneida
County; they stand between the members of the firm and disagreeable
clients; they hire and discharge the office boys; they do everything
from writing a brief for the Supreme Court of the United States down to
making the contract with the window cleaners; they are the only lawyers
who really know anything and they were once promising young men, who
have found out at last that life and the Sunday-school books are very
far apart; but they run the works and make the law a gentleman's
profession for the rest of us. They are always there. Others come, grow
older, go away, but they remain. Many of them drink. All of which would
be irrelevant, incompetent and immaterial if this were not a legal
story.

Scraggs had been one of these, but he had also been one of those