Two Georgia Judges suppress this evil by juries, I have taken the only other method within my cog nizance." Judge Dooly it was too, who, becom ing involved in an unfortunate dispute with a brother of the bench, Judge Tait, received from him a request for satisfaction by the code duello, then widely in vogue throughout the South. Now Judge Tait had a wooden leg, and his adversary, receiving the challenge, replied with serene good nature that the two could scarcely fight on equal terms and hence he must in honor decline. But Judge Tait, more than ever indig nant, wrote in return taunting him with rank cowardice, and repeated the de mand for satisfaction on the field. Still preserving his equanimity, Dooly replied by saying that he was sorry to find himself mistaken in supposing his brother of the bench too magnanimous to take advantage of an adversary by putting up his old wooden leg against two live ones. "But," he went on, "since you are determined to settle the matter in the way proposed, I am ready to meet you at any place or on any day agreed upon, provided I am allowed to put one of my own legs in a bee-gum!" This clever bit of strategy simply infuriated Judge Tait, who wrote in reply that, seeing he could get no satis faction from such a craven, he now proposed to publish the affair all over the state. But still his unruffled adversary proved impervious to threats and closed the belligerent correspondence with genuine Celtic blitheness! "Go ahead, my dear brother," he wrote; "I'd rather fill all the newspapers in Georgia than one coffin!" Dooly it was, again, who, while at a public dinner, fell into dispute with Major Freeman Walker, and, to make bad matters worse, kept firing away at
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his martial opponent until forbearance was at an end; the Major sprang up and came at his enemy with an uplifted chair. Dooly thereupon seized a carv ing knife, and squared himself to do some very genuine execution. Several gentlemen instantly laid hold of the quite too well-armed judge, while only one seemed to think it necessary to lay a restraining hand upon the martial aggressor. "Stop, gentlemen," cried Dooly, in impetuous tones, "stop! One of you will be enough to keep me from doing mis chief. All the rest of you for God's sake take hold of Major Walker!" Amid the ensuing laughter, hostilities came to a happy close, and the pleasant finale of a "handshake all round" closed the unique affair. That portion of the Georgia Reports which is filled by the decisions of Chief Justice Logan E. Bleckley makes fasci nating reading for lawyer or layman. His judicial opinions, models as they are of precision and perspicuity, intensely char acterized, also, by sound judgment and correct apprehension of the law, are yet rich in imagery and metaphor, and scintillant with pure, spontaneous humor, a humor which, though trenchant, never sinks to buffoonery or farce. Scarcely another judge but Bleckley, in rendering the decision that, while the assets of a corporation may be seized by the Federal Courts, yet the body corpor ate can not be dissolved, would have summed up the whole matter so aptly. "Your money, not your life," said he, "is the demand of the Bankrupt Act." And no other but he could have said, when deciding that the purchaser of property from one who has no title, can not recover the price unless he tenders back the property, "Restitution before absolution is as sound in law as in theology."
