'Why, yes; as far as my vocation will permit. I am, as Hamlet
says, indifferent honest, when my clients and their solicitors do
not make me the medium of conveying their double-distilled lies to
the bench. But oportet vivere! it is a sad thing. And now to our
business. I am glad my old friend Mac-Morlan has sent you to me;
he is an active, honest, and intelligent man, long sheriff-
substitute of the county of--under me, and still holds the office.
He knows I have a regard for that unfortunate family of
Ellangowan, and for poor Lucy. I have not seen her since she was
twelve years old, and she was then a sweet pretty girl, under the
management of a very silly father. But my interest in her is of an
early date. I was called upon, Mr. Mannering, being then sheriff
of that county, to investigate the particulars of a murder which
had been committed near Ellangowan the day on which this poor
child was born; and which, by a strange combination that I was
unhappily not able to trace, involved the death or abstraction of
her only brother, a boy of about five years old. No, Colonel, I
shall never forget the misery of the house of Ellangowan that
morning! the father half-distracted--the mother dead in premature
travail--the helpless infant, with scarce any one to attend it,
coming wawling and crying into this miserable world at such a
moment of unutterable misery. We lawyers are not of iron, sir, or
of brass, any more than you soldiers are of steel. We are
conversant with the crimes and distresses of civil society, as you
are with those that occur in a state of war, and to do our duty in
either case a little apathy is perhaps necessary. But the devil
take a soldier whose heart can be as hard as his sword, and his
dam catch the lawyer who bronzes his bosom instead of his
forehead! But come, I am losing my Saturday at e'en. Will you have