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The Green Bag
guided by the strictest rules of evidence. He never laughed. But he wore great, bright, creaking boots; and in poising himself on these boots, with his large head bent down and his eyebrows joined together, awaiting an answer to one of his cross-questions, he sometimes caused the boots to creak, as if they laughed in a dry and suspicious manner. To his clerk, Wemmick, he always seemed as if he had set a man-trap and was watching it. "Suddenly, click, you're caught!" To others he gave theidea that they must have committed a felony and somehow forgotten the de tails of it. In trying a case, if anybody, of what soever degree, said a word that Jaggers didn't approve of, he instantly required to have it "taken down." If- anybody wouldn't make an admission, he said, "I'll have it out of you!" and if any body made an admission, he said, "Now I have got you!" The magis trates shivered under a single bite of his finger, and thieves and thieftakers hung in dread rapture on his words, and shrank when a hair of his eyebrows turned in their direction. He always carried an expressive pocket handkerchief of rich silk and imposing proportions, which was of great value to him in his profession. He would terrify a client or a witness by cere moniously unfolding it as if he were immediately going to blow his nose, and then pausing, as if he knew he should not have time to do it before such client or witness committed him self; and oftentimes the self-committal followed directly quite as a matter of course. He washed his clients off as if he were a surgeon or a dentist. He had a closet in his room, fitted up for the purpose, which smelt of scented soap like a perfumer's shop. It had an unusually large jack-towel on a roller
inside the door, and he would wash his hands and wipe them and dry them all over this towel, whenever he came in from a police-court or dismissed a client from his room. Jaggers' office, handy to Newgate prison, reflected his affiliations with the criminal branch of the law. Dismal and but dimly lighted, it was orna mented with odd objects that Mr. Jaggers kept there as gruesome sou venirs of his professional experience. There was an old rusty pistol, a sword in a scabbard, several strange looking boxes and packages, and two dreadful ghastly casts on a shelf, of faces pecu liarly swollen and twitchy about the nose. His own high-backed chair was of deadly black horsehair, with rows of brass nails round it, like a coffin, in which Mr. Jaggers leaned back and bit his forefinger at, and cross-examined, his clients. These latter seemed to have a habit of backing up against the wall, where, especially opposite to Mr. Jag gers' chair, it was greasy with shoulders. On Pip's first visit to this office, he finds lounging around several of Jaggers' clients who had got into the meshes of the law. These were all told to "see Wemmick" (the clerk who "kept the cash") and were then dismissed, — con fident that as long as Jaggers was "for them," he "would do it if it was to be done." In the firm of Spenlow & Jorkins, in "David Copperfield," we have a genteel pair of piratical proctors. At the sug gestion of his aunt, and on the payment by her of one thousand pounds to them, David is articled to this firm. What is a proctor, Steerforth?" David asks his friend. "Why, he is a sort of monkish attorney," replies Steerforth. "He is to some faded courts held in Doctors' Commons — a lazy old nook near St. Paul's churchyard — what solicitors are
