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