- more and Eckhart, I turned to the office boy, who
was sitting near the door at the futile little desk all office boys occupy, and on which they scribble mysterious things, to ask whether the judge was in. When I spoke to the boy he looked up and smiled and called me by name. He seemed to be, for some reason, glad to see me, as if I had been some one from home. In fact, he said:
"Have you been down lately?"
I examined him quite attentively for an instant. He had half risen from his chair, and stood, or hung, in an awkward attitude over his desk. Presently I recognized him as the boy who used to tend the cigar stand in the hotel at the state capital, and read Reeves' History of the English Law. I asked him what he was doing in the city.
"Why," he said, in apparent surprise at my question, "I'm practising law!"
His eyes, in his pale face, dilated with a childish pride, until they were large and round and brilliant. He had drawn himself quite erect, and now he waved his hand toward the wall, and there I saw, in a new oak frame, the old familiar law license the supreme court issues to poor devils with illusions.
