Hussars, which gallant regiment, I observe, is a more favourite theme
with both Miss Catherine and her brother than with my old friend, who
presently looked at his watch, and said something significantly to Mr.
James about office hours. The youth got up with the ease of a youngster
that would be thought a man of fashion rather than of business, and
endeavoured, with some success, to walk out of the room, as if the
locomotion was entirely voluntary; Miss Catherine and her sisters left
us at the same time, and now, thought I, my trial comes on.

Reader, did you ever, in the course of your life, cheat the courts of
justice and lawyers, by agreeing to refer a dubious and important
question to the decision of a mutual friend? If so, you may have
remarked the relative change which the arbiter undergoes in your
estimation, when raised, though by your own free choice, from an
ordinary acquaintance, whose opinions were of as little consequence to
you as yours to him, into a superior personage, on whose decision your
fate must depend _pro tanto_, as my friend Mr. Fairscribe would say. His
looks assume a mysterious if not a minatory expression; his hat has a
loftier air, and his wig, if he wears one, a more formidable buckle.

I felt, accordingly, that my good friend Fairscribe, on the present
occasion, had acquired something of a similar increase of consequence.
But a week since, he had, in my opinion, been indeed an
excellent-meaning man, perfectly competent to every thing within his own
profession, but immured, at the same time, among its forms and
technicalities, and as incapable of judging of matters of taste as any
mighty Goth whatsoever, of or belonging to the ancient Senate-House of
Scotland. But what of that? I had made him my judge by my own election;
and I have often observed, that an idea of declining such a reference,
on account of his own consciousness of incompetency, is, as it perhaps