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JOURNAL OF A ROLLING STONE.

EIGHTH ENTRY.

Since my call to the Bar, have been treating myself to rather a long roll abroad.  Now, however, the time has come to devote myself to the work of the profession, which seems to mean studying practical law with some discreet and learned Barrister.

[Illustration:  Dick Fibbins.]

Met a few nights ago, at dinner, a very entertaining fellow.  Full of legal anecdotes.  Told that it was DICK FIBBINS, a Barrister, “and rather a rising one.”  DICK (why not RICHARD?) talked about County Courts with condescending tolerance; even the High Court Judges seemed (according to his own account) to habitually quail before his forensic acumen.

Mentioned to FIBBINS that I had just been “called,” and was “thinking of reading in a Barrister’s chambers;” and he seemed to take the most friendly and generous interest in me at once—­asked me, indeed, to call on him any day I liked at his chambers in Waste Paper Buildings, which I thought extremely kind, as I was a complete stranger.

Go next day.  Clerk, with impressive manner, receives me with due regard to his principal’s legal standing. (Query—­has a rising Barrister any standing?) Ushered into large room, surrounded with shelves containing, I imagine, the Law Reports from the Flood downwards.  Just thinking what an excellent “oldest inhabitant” METHUSELAH would have made in a “Right of Way” case, when DICK FIBBINS rises from the wooden arm-chair on which he has been sitting at a table crowded with papers, and bundles tied up in dirty red tape, and shakes hands heartily.

“What’s your line of country?” he asks—­“Equity or Common Law?”

I admit that it’s Common Law.  Have momentary feeling that Equity sounds better, Why Common Law?

“Quite right,” he says, encouragingly; “much the best branch. I am a Common-Law man too.”  Refers to it as if it were a moral virtue on his—­and my—­part to have avoided Equity.  Wonder if Equity men talk in this way about “Common” Lawyers?  If so, oughtn’t there to be more esprit de corps in the Profession?

“Been before old PROSER, Queen’s Bench Division, to-day,” he proceeds.  “Do you ever sit in Court?”

I reluctantly confess that I have not made an habitual point of doing so.

“Ah,” he says, finding that I can’t contradict him as to what did really happen in old PROSER’s Court to-day; “you should have been there just now.  Had BLOWHARD, the great Q.C., opposed to me.  But, bless you, he couldn’t do anything to speak of against my arguments.  PROSER really hardly would listen to him once or twice.  Made BLOWHARD quite lose his temper, I assure you.”

“So he lost his case, too, I suppose?” I remark, humorously.