lawyer’s brief case and attends him throughout a trial.  Three years go by—­five—­and he finds that he is still doing the same thing.  He is now a member of the bar, he has become the managing clerk, he attends to fairly important matters, engages the office force, superintends transfer of title, occasionally argues a motion.  Five years more go by and perhaps his salary is raised a trifle more.  Then one day he awakes to the realization that his future is to be only that of a trusted servitor.

Perchance he is married and has a baby.  The time has come for him to choose whether he will go forth and put his fortune to the test “to win or lose it all” or settle down into the position of faithful legal hired man.  He is getting a bit bald, he has had one or two tussles with his bank about accidental overdrafts.  The world looks pretty bleak outside and the big machine of the law goes grinding on heartless, inevitable.  Who is he to challenge the future?  The old job is fairly easy; they can’t get on without him, they say; here is where he belongs; he knows his business—­give him his thirty-five hundred a year and let him stay!

That is Binks, or Calkins, or Shivers, or any one of those worried gray-haired men who sit in the outer office behind a desk strewn with papers and make sure that no mistakes have been made.  To them every doubtful question of practise is referred and they answer instantly—­sometimes wrongly, but always instantly.  They know the last day for serving the demurrer in Bilbank against Terwilliger and whether or not you can tax a referee’s fee as a disbursement in a bill of costs; they are experts on the precise form for orders in matrimonial actions and the rule in regard to filing a summons and complaint in Oneida County; they stand between the members of the firm and disagreeable clients; they hire and discharge the office boys; they do everything from writing a brief for the Supreme Court of the United States down to making the contract with the window cleaners; they are the only lawyers who really know anything and they were once promising young men, who have found out at last that life and the Sunday-school books are very far apart; but they run the works and make the law a gentleman’s profession for the rest of us.  They are always there.  Others come, grow older, go away, but they remain.  Many of them drink.  All of which would be irrelevant, incompetent and immaterial if this were not a legal story.

Scraggs had been one of these, but he had also been one of those who drank, and now he was merely a bookkeeper.  Miss Wiggin reigned in his stead.

A woman and not a man kept Tutt & Tutt on the map.  When this sort of thing occurs it is usually because the woman in question is the ablest and very likely also the best person in the outfit, and she assumes the control of affairs by a process of natural selection.  Miss Wiggin was the conscience, if Mr. Tutt was the heart, of Tutt & Tutt.  Nobody, unless it was Mr. Tutt, knew where she had come from or why she was working if at all in only a semi-respectable law office.  Without her something dreadful would have happened to the general morale.  Everybody recognized that fact.