520
The Green Bag
a high collar to hide my ever increasing Adam's apple. Well, to come back from our digres sion, Mr. Shirk's great and particular fear was that he might do more work than he was paid for. His weekly insult, as he termed it, was all of $10, and there was no possible ground or foundation
for his fear. None the less it was prob ably stronger because of its very lack of solid and reasonable foundation
ask Mr. Shirk to argue any cases in the Court of Appeals and we never could afford to raise his salary sufiiciently to make it worth his while to do the sort of work we had for him. All this probably weighed on his soul for he finally left us. His reason for departing was that we didn't have work enough
for him and that he thought he would best look for a busier office where there would be more opportunity for advance ment. Ten years have passed and we seldom run across our friend Shirk. He lives
and it showed itself in many forms and in various guises, sometimes as to quantity of work and again as to quality. Our worthy clerk could not be bothered in Brooklyn or the Bronx and is married to copy letters, write up the register, and father of a healthy son. His wife serve papers, or look after small collec does the cooking and baby tending and tions, because he certainly could not incidentally does a little private tutoring be expected to waste his time upon such to help out the food supply. He himself profitless drudgery at $10 per. Nor seems to have some sort of a “stand in" on the other hand could he afford to with one of our political police magi-5 meet the senior partner and a wealthy trates and is forever defending cases client at the Bar Association rooms before that jurist. Of course he cannot in the evening to get up a contract — afford to do very much work for the he certainly would not be fool enough prices that police court clients can pay to sell the firm twenty-four hours per But then it is rumored that he does not day for the insignificant sum of $10 have to do a terrible lot of work to get per week. The net result of these his clients discharged by that particular Law clerks, like some and similar self-imposed limitations magistrate. upon his work, was that he was kept other things known to nature, seem to very busy dodging assignments and at seek their own level. Mr. Stillman was our next experiment the same time regretting that there was nothing for him to‘ do. If he saw and in many ways he was an excellent the senior partner coming in his direction man. He was not the brightest 01' he might assume an important and quickest lawyer that I ever saw but he abstracted air and hurry down the hall had lots of common sense, considerable where he would take a drink of water ability in handling men and was all and wait till said partner had retired earnest worker. But perhaps he was to his den. Perhaps a little later another brighter than he seemed, for he never member of the firm might make threaten talked much and gave us very little ing advances in his direction, and he opportunity to judge him. His great would hurriedly grab his hat and specialty was work — from early morn hasten out to lunch. Or if it didn't ing till late night he was always working happen to be lunch time, as likely as hard. We did not have many small not he ran out "to mail a letter" or matters that we could turn over bodily "to look up a little matter at the library." to a clerk, and that is probably why we We somehow never felt impelled to really never learned the full extent of
