It was one of the unvarying rules of Judge Bradley’s office, and indeed this was almost the only rule which he imposed, that the law student within his gates, no matter what his age or earlier servitude, should each morning sweep out the office, and should, when so requested, copy out any law papers needing to be executed in duplicate.  So long as a student did these things, he was welcome as long as he cared to stay.  The judge never troubled himself about the studies of his pupil, never asked him a question, indeed never even told him what books it might be best to read, unless this advice were asked voluntarily by the student himself.  He simply gave the candidate a broom, a chair, and the freedom of the library, which latter was the best law library in the town.  What more could one ask who contemplated a career at law?  It was for him to work out his own salvation; and to sweep the stairs each morning.

Edward Franklin accepted his seat in Judge Bradley’s office without any reservations, and he paid his daily fee of tenure as had all the other students before him, scorning not the broom.  Indeed, his conscience in small things augured well, for it was little cousin to his conscience in great things.  Ardent, ambitious, and resolute, he fell upon Blackstone, Chitty, and Kent, as though he were asked to carry a redoubt.  He read six, eight, ten hours a day, until his head buzzed, and he forgot what he had read.  Then at it all over again, with teeth set.  Thus through more than a year he toiled, lashed forward by his own determination, until at length he began to see some of the beautiful first principles of the law—­that law, once noble and beneficent, now degraded and debased; once designed for the protection of the individual, now used by society as the instrument for the individual’s extermination.  So in his second year Franklin fared somewhat beyond principles merely, and got into notes and bills, torts, contracts, and remedies.  He learned with a shiver how a promise might legally be broken, how a gift should be regarded with suspicion, how a sacred legacy might be set aside.  He read these things again and again, and forced them into his brain, so that they might never be forgotten; yet this part of the law he loved not so much as its grand first principles of truth and justice.

One morning, after Franklin had finished his task of sweeping down the stairs, he sat him down by the window with Battersleigh’s letter in his hand; for this was now the third day since he had received this letter, and it had been in his mind more vividly present than the pages of the work on contracts with which he was then occupied.  It was a bright, fresh morning in the early spring.  A little bird was singing somewhere near the window.  From where Franklin sat he could see the green grass just starting, over in the courthouse yard.  A long and lazy street lay in perspective before the window, and along it, out beyond the confines of the town,