"to institute condemnation proceedings, and to condemn, and to abolish, any
canal not exceeding thirty miles in length and not a part of the connected
canal system of the state."

When I hung up the receiver I was so absorbed that I had forgotten Saxe was
waiting. He made some slight sound. I wheeled on him. I needed a vent. If
he hadn't been there I should have smashed a chair. But there was he--and I
kicked him out of my private office and would have kicked him out through
the anteroom into the outer hall, had he not gathered himself together and
run like a jack-rabbit.

Since that day I have done my own calendar watching.

By this incident I do not mean to suggest that there are not honorable men
in the legal profession. Most of them are men of the highest honor, as are
most business men, most persons of consequence in every department of life.
But you don't look for character in the proprietors, servants, customers
and hangers-on of dives. No more ought you to look for honor among any of
the people that have to do with the big gilded dive of the dollarocracy.
They are there to gamble, and to prostitute themselves. The fact that they
look like gentlemen and have the manners and the language of gentlemen
ought to deceive nobody but the callow chaps of the sort that believes the
swell gambler is "an honest fellow" and a "perfect gentleman otherwise,"
because he wears a dress suit in the evening and is a judge of books and
pictures. Lawyers are the doorkeepers and the messengers of the big dive;
and these lawyers, though they stand the highest and get the biggest fees,
are just what you would expect human beings to be who expose themselves to
such temptations, and yield whenever they get an opportunity, as eager and
as compliant as a _cocotte_.