A Blackstone Christmas Eve. five long and dreary weeks, hourly and daily expecting, hoping and praying for my re lease, as I knew any detention was wholly illegal. Finally it came, thank God! I was free again! Free to breathe the sweet air of heaven! Free to go and come! Free to do my own will! Free to eat, drink and sleep like decent people, and associate with them! " He alleges that in his imprison ment he wrote " letters of distress " to prom inent lawyers and politicians, who had "known him in his days of prosperity," but their minds had been "poisoned" by the " Herald's " virus, and " they failed to respond." He describes in a naive manner
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how he came to owe this board-bill. He "went to the St. Nicholas hotel on a cold, rainy night in December, '74, without a cent. I had nowhere else to go," because he had been black-listed as a boarding-house swindler. Then in a rider, in his own writ ing, he continues: "So I went to the St. Nicholas hotel, with the result already men tioned. At a cheap place you have to pay in advance. At a first-class place they present their bills at the end of the week. I hadn't a cent, and had to go where I could get trust ed or starve!' Some method in that madness. Such is the piteous tale of this modern Robert Macaire.
A BLACKSTONE CHRISTMAS EVE. FOR anyone twenty years ago in the City of New York to confess himself ignor ant of the law-firm of " Briefner, McMahon & Cuming," was to admit himself unknown. Those were not the days of twenty-storied sky-scrapers, or doubtless their offices would have been more elaborate and more expensively furnished than these were at the time when this story opens in the building on Cedar Street, near Broadway, which those offices occupied. Briefner, senior partner, was gifted with exquisite taste, and had fur nished his own chambers and the adjacent ones of his partners with desks, chairs, closets for papers and documents, settees and book cases, that were all made of the best Hon duras mahogany. Their grates for the con sumption of cheerfully flaming bituminous coal were artistically tiled at the sides; and even in summer weather seemed to glow pleasantly. In the working-chamber of the senior partner hung a fine line engraving of Lord Chief-Justice Mansfield and another of Federal Chief-Justice Marshall side by side; and each greatly worshipped by Brief ner because, as he often remarked to partner McMahon when the latter found it difficult
to surrender views, " Each of them was so just as to have reversed his own previous opinions. Senor Jerome Ravel of the Niblo acrobatic troupe" Briefner would sometimes add, pointing toward the pictures, "was not the only man who could reverse himself un der the public gaze." Briefner was of course the oracle of the firm; McMahon was its cajoler of juries and the magnetizer of judges on motion days; while Cuming "ran the office" as pleader, conveyancer and supervisor of the fat regis ters which attested the great business of the law-firm with clients. To employ B. M. and C. (as the form appeared on Court calen dars) was to win a case ab initio; and many a hush retainer it received merely to remain neutral in a cause cclcbre. The managing clerk was a brisk, shrewd attorney (who had been a London solicitor in his younger days) named Gideon Billings, who was so rigid in exacting that a lawyer should never bother about anything outside of his profession, that he always eyed the picture of Chief-Jus tice Marshall askance and negatively shook his head at it, because, as Billings said, " that jurist had once wasted his time by writ
