A lawyer was cross-questioning a negro wit ness in one of the justice courts at Macon, Ga., the other day, and was getting along fairly well until he asked the witness what his occupation was. " I'se a carpenter, sah." " What kind of a carpenter?" "They calls me a jack-leg car penter, sah." " What is a jack-leg carpenter?" "He is a carpenter who is not a first-class carpenter, sah." " Well explain fully what you understand a jack-leg carpenter to be," insisted the lawyer. " Boss, I declare I dunno how ter splain any 'mo 'cept to say hit am jes' the same difference twixt you an' er fust-class lawyer." Col. Dellett of Claiborne represented the Mobile district in Congress as a whig in the mid dle of this century and was a well-known lawyer in Southern Alabama. While trying a case before Judge Lipscomb one time, the Colonel locked horns with the Judge. The rulings left little standing in court for the plaintiff, Dellett became angry and fiercely exclaimed that he had his remedy. "Well, what is your remedy," inquired Lipscomb. Rather meekly the Colonel said, "I will take a non-suit." The bar took in the situation, and " Dellett's remedy " became a proverb. B— is a young attorney. He likes to think that he belongs to a learned profession. He was telling another lawyer the other day of an honest, old German who had come to his office for ad vice in regard to trouble with a landlord. "Said I to him — Did you enter into a synal lagmatic with this man?" "Well, what did he say to that?" "Will you believe it,— the d—d fool told me that he didn't know whether he had or not."
An old Irishman, a resident of Bangor, Me., was an important witness in a case, and both he and the lawyers who were trying to examine him were having a hard time of it. The witness was very slack and frowzy in his personal appearance, and this heightened the effect of his blarney im mensely. He perspired freely under the ordeal of examination, and was evidently wishing it well over, when the door at the rear of the court room opened, and in came a little, sharp-eyed, old Irishwoman. The witness saw her, and a
look of intense relief spread over his features as he blurted out : " There! There is me old woman come in. Ax her some of your dum fool ish questions. She kin take care o' ye." LEGAL, ANTIQUITIES. It was said by Alexander ab Alexandro, a fa mous Neapolitan lawyer about 1500, that, when he saw it was impossible for advocates to support their clients against the power and favor of the great, it was to no purpose to take so much pains in studying the law, for the issue of suits de pended, not on the justice of the cause, but on the favor and affection of a lazy and corrupt judge, whom the laws suppose to be a good and upright man. NOTES. Br1t1sh Fa1r-Play. — The late rowing fiasco of the Cornell boys on the Thames hardens us in our favorite vacation theory of the inutility of ex ercise and the safety of indolence. Those lads have probably shortened their lives by over-ex ercise. It also affords an opportunity for a few remarks on the British legend of " fair play." The Buffalo " News " very justly says : — "The Englishmen won the contest with the oars, but the second and vastly more important contest — that of su premacy in gentlemanliness and national honor — went to Cornell by much more than eight lengths." The great trouble with the English is that they are insubordinate against the rulings of their own arbitrators. Their umpire said to our boys, "go," and they went, and he did not order them back. In larger affairs they show the same spirit — they railed against the Alabama award. Now will any Englishman pretend that if Cornell had refused to go, the English crew would have come back? They cannot make any American believe it. Such politeness they reserve for their own people. This peculiar notion of "fair play" was illustrated in the Heenan-Sayers fight, in which the spectators broke up the ring when they found their man was whipped. Even Thackeray claims the result as a British victory, in " Round about Papers." Sullivan encountered the same spirit in his fight with Mitchell. Corbett proba bly had very good reason for declining to fight in England. Henry Ward Beecher met the same spirit when he tried to address the mob at Liver
