Do you know, Peter, I was thinking seriously of leaving the bar, when you came into the room?
Upon my conscience, it's in earnest I am.' "Peter believed me, I think, for I saw him give a very peculiar look as he pocketed his half-crown and left the room.
"The door was scarcely closed when I gave way to the free transport of my ecstasy; there it lay at last, the long looked-for, long wished-for object of all my happiness, and though I well knew that a junior counsel has about as much to do in the conducting of a case as a rusty handspike has in a naval engagement, yet I suffered not such thoughts to mar the current of my happiness.

There was my name in conjunction with the two mighty leaders on the circuit; and though they each pocketed a hundred, I doubt very much if they received their briefs with one half the satisfaction.

My joy at length a little subdued, I opened the roll of paper and began carefully to peruse about fifty pages of narrative regarding a watercourse that once had turned a mill; but, from some reasons doubtless known to itself or its friends, would do so no longer, and thus set two respectable neighbors at loggerheads, and involved them in a record that had been now heard three several times.
"Quite forgetting the subordinate part I was destined to fill, I opened the case in a most flowery oration, in which I descanted upon the benefits accruing to mankind from water-communication since the days of Noah; remarking upon the antiquity of mills, and especially of millers, and consumed half an hour in a preamble of generalities that I hoped would make a very considerable impression upon the court.

Just at the critical moment when I was about to enter more particularly into the case, three or four of the great unbriefed came rattling into my room, and broke in upon the oration.
"'I say, Power,' said one, 'come and have an hour's skating on the canal; the courts are filled, and we sha'n't be missed.' "'Skate, my dear friend,' said I, in a most dolorous tone, 'out of the question; see, I am chained to a devilish knotty case with Kinshella and Mills.' "'Confound your humbugging,' said another, 'that may do very well in Dublin for the attorneys, but not with us.' "'I don't well understand you,' I replied; 'there is the brief.

Hennesy expects me to report upon it this evening, and I am so hurried.' "Here a very chorus of laughing broke forth, in which, after several vain efforts to resist, I was forced to join, and kept it up with the others.
"When our mirth was over, my friends scrutinized the red-tape-tied packet, and pronounced it a real brief, with a degree of surprise that certainly augured little for their familiarity with such objects of natural history.
"When they had left the room, I leisurely examined the all-important document, spreading it out before me upon the table, and surveying it as a newly-anointed sovereign might be supposed to contemplate a map of his dominions.
"'At last,' said I to myself,--'at last, and here is the footstep to the woolsack.' For more than an hour I sat motionless, my eyes fixed upon the outspread paper, lost in a very maze of revery.