theless (as I have informed Mr Smartle), my progenitor, the Mooktear, will bleed to any reasonable extent of costs out of pocket.
I have held frequent and lengthy interviews with the said Smartle, Esq., who is of incredible despatch and celerity—though I sometimes regret that I did not procure a solicitor of a more senile and sympathetic disposition.
Assuredly had I done so, such an one would not, after perusing my Statement of Defence—a most magnificently voluminous document of over fifty folios, crammed and stuffed with satirical hits and sideblows, and pathetic appeals for the Bench's indulgence, and replete with familiar quotations from best classical and continental authors—such an one, I say, would not have split his sides with disrespectful chucklings, thrown my composition into a wasted paper receptacle, and proceeded to knock off a meagre substitute of his own, containing a very few dry bald paragraphs, in the inadequately brief space of under the hour.
Such, however, was Mr Smartle's course; and the sole consolation is that, owing to his unprofessional precipitation, the action was set down for trial previously to the commencement of the Long Vacation, and my case may come on some time next Term, and I be put out of my misery at the close of the year.
My aforesaid legal adviser, finding that I adhered with the tenacity of bird-slime to my
