les; there are the ashes of many nights and days
of toil and struggle sprinkled upon his hair; he has fought his way (from
where thou sittest a listener to where he stands a speaker), as if through
an Indian gauntlet file. There were a hundred mouths waiting for the first
crumbs which came to his impatient legal digestion; and a hundred envious
heads and hearts to worry him if possible into a dyspepsia over those
crumbs. He has began with an office in a fifth story, and _climbed down_
towards the street. He commenced to hive his honey near the roof! While
out of his office he climbed a professional ladder, the holding on to
which tasked all his powers of physical, mental, and pecuniary endurance.
Face the truth!

Reach me yonder diary and legal register. Two thousand practising lawyers
in the city of New-York! Out of these one hundred are "notables;" fifty
are "distinguished;" twenty-five are eminent.

A large body of them are "conveyancers" growing thin in person and thinner
in mind over deeds and titles; a larger body "attorneys"--getters up and
supervisors of suits--providers of ammunition for "distinguished counsel"
to discharge with loud reports (the said counsel brilliant by the flash:
the attorney obscured in the smoke); many, very many, chained to
"larcenies" at the Sessions, "landlord dispossessions" at the Marine
Court, suits on butcher's bills at Ward Courts, or "malicious
prosecutions" in the Common Pleas.

Yet there are hundreds of coral reefs and pearls for persevering divers in
this ocean of litigation. Three thousand pending cases every month are
three thousand nutshells where the meat is often fresh and oily, even with
the weary keeping on the calendar for months and years. There are _some_
counsel who pocket fees and costs to the tune of twenty thousand a year.
We know many a Quirk, Gammon and Snap, who realize an undoubted "ten
thousand a year," with no Tittlebat Titmouse for a standing annoyance. And
we can taper off on the finger many who do not realize five hundred a
year, and work like negro slaves at that: they are continually rough
hewing, but no divinity shapes their ends.

Five years of "starvation," and five more years of toil and trouble,
constitute the depth of a lawyer's slough of despond in New-York; to say
nothing of the giants' castles to storm upon the way, or the fights with
the Apolyons of Envy. Obviously so!

A man now-a-days will let a young Sawbones advise ice for his child's