Legal Reminiscences. court-house and hotel in Middlebury, and gray-haired sires tell their grandsons of the glorious fun we had at least once a year. Now, forty years afterward, I bear testimony to the fact that nowhere in the State was the hard work of our profession so agreeable, the brethren so courteous to the court and to each other, rivalry and jealousy so com pletely suppressed among members of the bar in Vermont as in Addison County. These excellent results were largely due to the annual bar supper! Young Vermont lawyers were sometimes eminently fitted to "go West and grow up with the country." I was for many years chairman of the committee to examine can didates for admission to the bar. One day there came before us two young men who had " entered their names " in some office, and there devoted themselves to teaching. Of the law, of any branch of the law, they were as ignorant as so many Hottentots. The only rule they had pretended to comply with was their term of service in a law office, and their graduation from some college. I frankly told them that for them to attempt to practise law would be wicked, danger ous, and would subject them to suits for malpractice. They begged, they prayed, they cried. They had been poor, — had taught school to pay their way through col
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lege, and now wanted to go West. They overcame my associates; and I, with much self-reproach, consented to sign their certifi cates, on condition that each would buy a copy of Blackstone, Kent's Commentaries, and Chitty's Pleadings, and immediately emigrate to some Western town! They were admitted. For six or seven years I heard nothing of either. But in 1863 there came to my office in the Treasury in Washington a bulky package by expressBeing opened, it exposed a thick volume of seven hundred pages, in law calf, entitled "A Treatise on the Constitution of the United States of America." It was published by a firm of law booksellers in a Western State. One of the candidates whose admis sion had so strained my conscience was its learned author. It was dedicated to, and highly commended by, his rival in ignorance and his companion, with the title of " Justice of the Supreme Court" of the State to which they had so recently emigrated! I cannot pass judgment upon the book, for I have never read it; but I have seen it cited with approval in an opinion by the Chief-Justice of the United States. Both these young men, notwithstanding their bad start in life, went West, grew up with the country, and I have no doubt became good and useful members of the community.
