court could n't exactly tell now to whom the money did in fact belong (poor court, how could it after all those years?); but it con ceded that the money did not belong to it, and, considering the length of time it had kept it, that was quite an important conces sion for it to make. So the court made a sort of random shot, somewhere in the neigh borhood of the owner, and directed the fund to be divided among certain of the Great Greats, their wives and children, to the third and fourth generation. Now, this was fairly a good thing for the grandchildren; for if those who had been really entitled to the money had gotten it, these grandchildren would not have gotten it in all likelihood, to say nothing of the share that fell to the lot of those who helped in the getting of it. But who is there to speak for the long ago dead grandfathers, who perhaps waited and fretted and pined and died years and years before the court was induced finally to try its skill as a marksman? Now, those people, good and bad, whose gravestones topple on the burial-hill hard by, had a better right to that money than the generation that got it, and who can say how many a romance in their lives there was or might have been because they did not get their own? Yes, it is probably all the same to them now, for they all lie up there together in that sweet and green Mt. Hebron, — the litigants and the lawyers, the clerks and the judges, the commissioners and the witnesses, and those who tore down and those who built up the buildings again; but whatever more of want, of anger, of disappointment and unhappiness there came into this world be cause the court kept back that money, who will tell, unless it be entered up by the great clerk in the great book? And if that be so, is it in accord with the obvious fitness of things that the charges there shall be to the account of those who suffered them, rather than of those who made or let them be? But have these days and these things that should not be, entirely gone by? Is the cry of the law's delay but the muttering of the

unsatisfied? Is the public that thinks it better to give half its own loaf to whoever claims it rather than risk losing it all while it waits for justice an utterly unreasonable and mistaken creature? There never was a real public wrong that was not greatly exag gerated before it was righted; but I believe there never was a great complaint made for which the public did not have great and real reason to complain. I don't think it has yet been quite forty years since that prince of reporters gave the case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce to the public; and see you, my brethren of the bench and bar, whether these words be not still as true as when they were uttered : — <' This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire; which has its worn-out lunatics in every madhouse, and its dead in every churchyard; which has its ruined suitor with his slippered heels and threadbare dress, borrowing and begging through the round of every man's acquaintance; which gives to moneyed might the means abun dantly of wearying out the right; which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not one honorable man among its practitioners who would not give - who does not often give — the warning, ' Suffer any wrong that can be done you, rather than come here.'" These things which we all know, but which we say we ought not, in a case in court, to let ourselves know, because justice properly represented is so very blind, are like to the case of Madame S£vigne (was it not?), who having been a witness to some inappropriate conduct between a gentleman and a lady who was not his own wife, upon being asked about it, said, oh yes, she had seen it but she did not believe it, — these things which we know, but which the blindness of justice teaches us we should shut out from our eyes, and what I have termed the " romance of the law." To a greater or less extent they creep'into the record of a case; but it is seldom they make their appearance, or can in their na