"With saddened face and battered hat,

And eye that told of blank despair,
On wooden bench a traveller sat,

Cursing the fate that brought him there."

I hoped to be able to give to my readers the whole of this admirable poem, for I know well that no account of Essex Junction can be complete without it. But my way has been beset with many difficulties. All known copies of the poem have been bought up and suppressed by those whose hard fate anchors them to Essex Junction. Applications to the author for a copy have been met with invective, reproach, contumely, obloquy, and objurgation. Attempts to reproduce it from memory against his will have developed the fact that it is so thoroughly protected by trade-marks, design-patents, and copyrights that the inventor could at once enjoin its sale should its publication be attempted in invitum. After thorough investigation, I am convinced that but one consolation remains to the public. The line of this writer is so obviously poetry, not sacred but profane, that he may be expected hereafter to devote himself exclusively to its composition. In the first edition of his collected works we may therefore confidently expect to read with a sympathetic thrill the only great ballad of Essex Junction. I feel that I have in a perfunctory manner done my duty to the place and its proprietors, and that I may say of it as Uncle Toby said of the fly when he carefully put it outside the window: "Go, poor devil! In all this wide world there is room enough for both thee and me!"

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE HUMOR AND MISCHIEF OF THE JUNIOR BAROUR ANNUAL BAR FESTIVAL.

"Send out for all the lawyers,

Collect the jovial crowd,

To gather 'round the tables

With mirth and uproar loud.

Call those whom we so long have known—
Squire Seymour, Linsley, Starr,

And also all the devil's own-who?

Of course the junior bar!"

But we

THE term applied in the foregoing verse did not inaccurately describe a class of lawyers who in those early days were known as the junior bar. We did not have many clients nor much income. had abundance of leisure and were given to mischief as the sparks fly upward. There was one occasion. on which the safety-valve was thrown wide open and the dangerous pressure of humor was relieved. It was the annual supper of the bar at the winter term of the Supreme Court, held by all the judges at Middlebury, in the county of Addison. There we laid Coke and Blackstone on the shelf and sung with great fervor

"O dear brothers, may the time be distant, far,

When the first one shall be missing from the gathering of the bar."

That was a company of men with hearts and consciences which this festival annually brought to

gether. Our oldest brother of threescore and ten years we always called "Squire Seymour." A member of the celebrated Seymour family of Connecticut and New York, his kindly heart and amiable character secured not only our respect but our affection. There was an expression in his clear blue eyes which without exaggeration we called lovely. Our Starr was a deacon who could take a joke and make one, if necessary; others were Linsley, with a saturnine expression which was only skin-deep, and his stock song of "The Hunters of Kentucky;" John Prout, who seldom spoke above a whisper, and was consequently accused of making all the noise; Tucker, with his thirty-two degrees of Masonry and his eloquence in behalf of injured females; Needham, our Falstaff, with all the wit and weight but none of the grossness of his Shakespearian prototype; Geo. Chipman, the born gentleman from the mountain wilds of Ripton; Barber, the poet of love and free-soil! Our leaders in song were the brothers S., whose annual programmes always comprised "The McGregors' Gathering" and imitation opera. One of our most active members already gave promise of the eminence in diplomacy which he afterward attained, by his skill in the use of language to conceal ideas. Woodbridge and Grandey wore the honors of the largest city in Vermont, which was also celebrated as the smallest in the world. These, with occasional visitors from adjoining counties and worthy representatives of the names of Pierpont, Briggs, Beckwith, and Wright, always furnished abundant material for a feast of reason and a flow of soul.

We were officers of the court, bound to obedience to statutory law. Our State had adopted the "Maine

liquor law," and under the maxim in equity which presumed that to be done which ought to be done, the use of all beverages stronger than cider and spruce beer no longer prevailed. The only fluids upon our menu (we called it bill of fare) were Ripton mineral water, cider fermented and unfermented, and metheglin. Our judges, qualified as experts by long experience, were of opinion that the Ripton water had a delightful "blue-grass" aroma, that the cider in flavor and consequences was undistinguishable from a product of French vineyards imported in baskets, and that the metheglin closely resembled a complicated mixture known to our remote ancestors by the name of "rum-punch." These opinions were undoubtedly imaginative, though it must be admitted that the liberal absorption of these fluids softened the sternness of the judicial countenance and produced a change in its visual organs which once led our most venerable judge, pointing to our deacon, to break out with the nursery ballad, "Twinkle, twinkle, little Starr." The conclusive evidence that there was no deception in our bill of fare was the fact that no lawyer or judge was ever known to be absent at the opening of court at ten o'clock the next morning.

The wit of these festivals was much too personal for publication. It was always good-natured, never malicious. When it was raised to concert pitch, it was our delight to send out committees to bring in all the judges. Our invitations were never declined, for they knew that while our exercises promoted good feeling among the lawyers, they were never permitted to diminish our respect for the bench. But we did sometimes call upon them to explain their opinions in cases recently reported. One of them, naturally

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too realistic to appreciate a joke, had in a recent opinion defined a "heifer" as a calfless bovine two years old." This opinion we considered misleading. A committee secured the presence of the judge and formally demanded that he should explain whether or not a male bovine two years old, being calfless, was a heifer. He certainly was as the judge defined the word. We insisted that the opinion was an innovation calculated to disturb the certainty of the law. His explanations were much confused and we made the occasion very lively for him. He rather turned the laugh upon us, however, by the admission that his use of the word was inaccurate and "must have been induced by the increasing number and constant presence before him of sucking members of the bar." He offered to compromise by the order of a basket of something, and his explanation and compromise were accepted as satisfactory.

I recall one of our sentiments which worried another of our judges. The action of "book account" had been in use from the adoption of our constitution. It was originally intended for a case of mutual accounts or of an account with many items difficult of proof except by the oath of a party. In an action of this kind the parties had been permitted to testify long before the general statute which made all parties to an action witnesses. This action had been favored by the court and greatly extended. In a recent case it had been maintained in what looked much like a case of trespass, for carrying away a flight of cellar stairs, the judge observing that one stair could not, but a flight might be recovered for in this form of action. The sentiment to which he was called to respond was: