Mr. George Farnham, counsellor-at-law, having devoted ten years of his life to the remunerative toil of entangling certain persons in, and extricating certain others from, the meshes of the law, found himself, at the age of thirty-five, with a respectable balance in bank and a pronounced craving for rest and recreation. Summer was coming on, the courts would soon be closed, and a torpor was settling down upon the field of litigation, and the idea of a vacation abroad presented itself to his mind with alluring force. He was weary of briefs and bills of exceptions; his office was taking on, to his jaded eyes, an aspect of dreary dinginess that promised to become unendurable in the near future, and the long rows of buff-clad digests and revised statutes seemed
