uitous decrees are most
scrutable, are surely of man's devising and not of God's. Or we invent a
fire-new science, known as Eugenics, to treat the disease by new naming
of symptoms: and prattle of the well born, when we mean well fed; or the
degenerate, when we might more truly say the disinherited.

It is even held by certain poltroons that families have been started
gutterward, of late centuries, when a father has been gloriously slain in
the wars of the useless great. That such a circumstance, however
glorious, may have been rather disadvantageous than otherwise to children
thereby sent out into the world at six or sixteen years, lucky to become
ditch-diggers or tip-takers. That some proportion of them do become
beggars, thieves, paupers, sharpers, other things quite unfit for the ear
of the young person--a disconcerting consideration; such ears cannot be
too carefully guarded. That, though the occupations named are entirely
normal to all well-ordered states, descendants of persons in those
occupations tend to become "subnormal"--so runs the cant of it--something
handicapped by that haphazard bullet of a lifetime since, fired to
advance the glorious cause of--foreign commerce, or the like.

* * * * *

Mr. Mitchell occupied five rooms lined with law books and musty with the
smell of leather. These rooms ranged end to end, each with a door that
opened upon a dark hallway; a waiting-room in front, the private office
at the rear, to which no client was ever admitted directly. Depressed by
delay, subdued by an overflow of thick volumes, when he reaches a
suitable dejection he is tip-toed through dismal antechambers of wisdom,
appalled by tall bookstacks, ushered into the leather-chaired office, and
there further crushed by long shelves of dingy tin boxes, each box
crowded with weighty secrets and shelved papers of fabulous moment and
urgency; the least paper of the smallest box more important--the
unfortunate client is clear on that point--than any contemptible need of
his own. Cowed and chastened, he is now ready to pay a fee suitable to
the mind that has absorbed all the wisdom of those many bookshelves; or
meekly to accept as justice any absurdity or monstrosity of the law.

Mr. Mitchell was greeted by a slim, swarthy, black-eyed, elderly person
of twenty-five or thirty, with a crooked nose and a crooked mind, half
clerk and half familiar spirit--Mr. Joseph Pelman, to wit; who appeared