of breaking the close.  But the main harvest of the bar was from the shipping and from commerce, the daughter of the sea, which was soon to be vexed by the imperial decrees and orders in council of foreign powers, and by some retaliatory legislation of our own.  The highest standard of remuneration for the services of lawyers was what we would now deem low.  Wirt, writing from Norfolk in 1805, considered two thousand dollars to be laid up at the end of the year a fair reward for the highest talents.  One of the ablest leaders of the bar declared, seven years later, that when he was worth fifty thousand dollars he would retire from practice; while Wirt declared that he would retire as soon as he had accumulated a capital which would yield the annual interest of four thousand dollars.  It is certain that all the members of the bar of that day, as did all of the merchants, died poor with two prominent exceptions; and when we reflect that those two men held the front rank at the bar, one of them at least twenty years, the other near thirty, and neither on his withdrawal could be deemed wealthy, the inference is irresistible that, though now and then in that interval a big fee came rolling in from some vessel caught in the act of violating the embargo, or, at a much later date, from some prize case in the war between Spain and her South American colonies, the rewards of legal merit were low.

There was a branch of the old Bank of the United States, whose entire capital, distributed over the Union, was only ten millions.  There was as yet, and fourteen years later, no daily paper.  The Herald, then in its ninth year, was published three times a week, and was the organ of the democratic party.  It was not until two years later that the Ledger appeared in the field, under the lead of that able champion John Cowper, and gave the federal flag to the breeze.  More than fourteen years were to elapse before a daily paper was established.  The equinoctial storms sadly worried our fathers.  From the imperfect filling in of the streets and wharves, the tides rose high; and then, if we would keep out of sight St. Mark’s, the Rialto, and the palaces of merchant princes, Norfolk was another edition of Venice.  The canoe was our gondola, and “yo heave oh” were our echoes of Tasso.  A bold stream, that would float a vessel of one hundred tons, cut Granby and Bank streets in two, and just halted on the west side of Church, where it was almost met by another furious stream from Newton’s Creek.  At Town Bridge a torrent raged that was not to be crossed until the tide fell.  Freemason, between Brewer and Granby, presented a sea deep enough to float a vessel of one hundred tons.  Our Rialto on Granby was not erected till eighteen or twenty years later; and I remember our fathers were so proud of it, that they invited strangers to see it.  It took, for a time, the shine from the Navy Yard.  The health of the town ranked the lowest.  The tombstones in old St. Paul’s tell of the number