The Lawyer s Easy Chair, the Code of Procedure, which abolished his court. Mr. Clinton attributes the abolition of the Court of Chancery to the disgust felt by the Bar at this dis agreeable peculiarity of the Chancellor. We think Mr. Clinton is in error in saying that David Graham •' drafted a large part of the Code of Civil Procedure which was passed by the Legislature." It is our re collection that Mr. Field informed us that most of it was his own work, and that he drew many of the sections many times over before they came to the final form. Mr. Clinton's book is especially rich in remi niscences of David Graham and James W. Gerard. The former, before he was twenty-one, wrote the best work on practice ever made, and sold it for $500 to publishers " who netted thirty thousand dollars from the publication." Mr. Clinton enlightens us on one point which has always been a mystery to us, namely, the delay of some five years between the ar gument and the decision of the famous Lemmon Slave case in the Supreme Court. New York mer chants paid Lemmon $5,000 for his slaves, and he cared no more about it, until the State of Virginia, "having been aroused in regard to the slave ques tion," requested her attorney-general to stir up the case. Mr. Clinton, having been engaged for the master, withdrew in favor of O'Conor on the appeal. Mr. Clinton pays a merited tribute to our contributor, A. Oakey Hall, who was eight years assistant district attorney, and twelve years district attorney of the county of New York, as " courteous, fair, skillful, persevering and faithful," " thoroughly versed in criminal law," evincing "admirable tact, good judg ment and consummate ability "; his addresses, "able, effective, and at times, eloquent "; " there his talents shone to great advantage." Mr. Hall is one of the very few living men of whom Mr. Clinton speaks. We fully agree with Mr. Clinton that the decision of the Court of Appeals, in the Lowenberg case (27 N. Y. 336), is a curious monstrosity where a man was sentenced to imprisonment for life without any law for it, or even any attempt to formulate any on the part of the five judges who agreed to it, and where the only opinions published, or written so far as appears, are those of the three dissentients, which are perfectly conclusive against the decision. If lawyers may differ about this, there can be but one opinion of the case of Crimmins, who was convicted of murder under the same defective law as Mrs. Hartung and Shay, and who, being too poor to appeal and whose application for commutation being re fused, was executed, while the other two got off scot free. "A judicial murder," says Mr. Clinton, and so all must say. It is pleasant to turn from those dark pages to the account of the acquittal of the fam ous Polly Bodine, accused of murder, whose first thought was of suing Barnum for exhibiting an unflat
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tering wax figure of her, and of those dinners (A.D. 1850) furnished by the city to the court, counsel, and invited guests, — twelve or fifteen courses, and all kinds of wine and cigars, — at which the diners regularly sat from one o'clock to seven, while the jury were in waiting from two o'clock, having been reg ularly cautioned by Recorder Talmadge to return from their dinner in an hour and "not keep the Court waiting." Dining seems to have been the prin cipal event in the professional life of those days. Another dinner was given to the court, counsel and the jury who acquitted a young woman who had tried to kill her seducer, where the same recorder pro posed the health of the foreman of the jury, " who so nobly did his duty — notwithstanding his oath." The only weak point in the book is (as usual) the in dex, in which we look in vain for the name of Field or Walworth, or for any direction to those dinners.
The Fad of K . — Among the most senseless of the modern educational fads is that of converting C into K, in the pronunciation of words derived from the Greek or Latin. For example, instead of ceramies, we are instructed to say keramies, although to be consistent it ought to be spelled keramiks. There may be some propriety in thus spelling and pronouning words derived from the Greek, which had no C, but what can be said in defense of the application of this practice to words derived from the Latin, which had C, and no K? Therefore we kick at Kikero, and as for Kaisar for Caesar, it is, as Marjorie Fleming said of seven times seven, " what Nature herself can't endure." What excuse is there for " Kelt "? There is no consistency among the practitioners of this fad, for in respect to a word so clearly derived from the Greek and in such very common use as "bicycle," none of them have yet had the audacity (or audakity) to prescribe " bikikle." How would Tennyson groan at " a kikle of Cathay"! Let us not overwork the letter K, but recall Choate's remark about "over working the participle "— or partikiple.
Women as Process Servers. — Somehow the chairman has lately heard that above seven hundred new occupations are now open to woman. In " The Scarlet Letter " Hawthorne observed that needlework was the only art open to women. A novel one has just been called to his attention by a circular sent to him from Margaret I. Summers, of Brooklyn, N. Y., who annnounces that her "specialty is the satis factory service of summonses, etc., in the metropoli tan district of the greater New York, for out-of-town appreciative attorneys. Once tried I always retain the attorney as my client." " I succeed where others
