days on the turf of the New York commons excited more popular attention than this speech. Simeon Draper, afterwards Lin coln's Collector of the Port, and then chair man of the local Whig party, was heard to exultingly say at the finish of the meeting: "Boston may have its Webster and Choate, but New York has now their compeer in young Bill Evarts." In the Taylor and Fillmore campaign Mr. Evarts was again to the fore so much as a Whig orator that this political prominence called him in 1849 to become statutory assistant to the Federal district attorney, Jonathan Prescott Hall, who, long deceased, lives in legal annals as reporter of three volumes of Superior Court reports. In that capacity Mr. Evarts continued until 1853. It was atthat period I made his acquaintance, as I held the simi lar position with the county district attor ney, and we became brought together pro fessionally. Prescott Hall was a society man, and constitutionally indolent, which proved a boon to his assistant, because it threw him more actively into the legal fray; so much so, that when the Cuban fili busters of 1851 were, in deference to treaty with Spain, prosecuted for infringement, on board of the schooner " Cleopatra," of the neutrality law, Assistant Evarts was given exclusive control of the case for the Govern ment, and against the sympathies current among the jury panel he obtained a convic tion. I attended, for purposes of studious observation, the close of the trial, and I re call the big head on the spare shoulders, the nervous energy pervading every part of his gaunt countenance — such an one as the London caricaturists award the tradi tional spare figure of Brother Jonathan, and the slender, almost shrunken, arms that rose and fell in apt, angular gesture. But I for got the slender figure while listening to the fine robustness of his argument and the plumpness of his unanswerable, logical posi tions. Federal District Attorney Prescott Hall, throughout his official administration,
seemed to the public to be the assistant, and Evarts the chief. For several years politics was laid aside on the Evarts shelf, and he devoted him self assiduously to his profession. One of his specialties became the furnishing of opin ions to corporations whenever their direc tors were puzzled with possible legal com plications. It really became a fashion in Wall St. to say, " Well, let us take Evarts' opinion." I have seen him at a dinner party dexterously cut a pineapple — no ordinary feat to do well. Evarts cut into a hard legal problem as he would cut a pine apple — laying aside deftly the skin and rind, and getting at once into the pulp and juice of the controversy, and then sugaring it with clear style. A client might say of one of his opinions, " I do not care so much for his conclusions as for the reasons he assigns in reaching them." In speaking, Mr. Evarts often had queer involutions of sentences, but in composition these were never complicated nor confusing, but were as clean cut as an essay by Lord Bacon. He began legal life on the Daniel Websterian principle that a lawyer should never cheapen his services; and he always made heavy charges. David Dudley Field was then another lawyer who believed that the laborer was worthy of— as he humorously phrased it — his higher; and I have heard that American Justinian say, " a client is apt to pecuniarily take your services at your own valuation of them." In one case within my personal recollection, Mr. Evarts, in a railway controversy, received $20,000 for one opinion. And it was always an open secret that judges, when they would decide an appeal in his favor, freely used his brief, even in its verbiage. That was always of the best Anglo-Saxon, and if specimens of it are desired, these will be found in his eulogy on Chief-Justice Chase, before Dartmouth Col lege, in June, 1873; or in his oration at the Philadelphia Centennial of 1876; or at the unveiling of the Seward statue in Madison
