Little Water street, with an occasional haul from
Exchange alley and the river Styx. A set, rather older, ventured into
the expanse of Broadwater, and talked of the relations of landlord and
tenant, of master and apprentice, and sometimes, in that belligerent
neighborhood, of husband and wife, and not unfrequently of the writ of
breaking the close. But the main harvest of the bar was from the
shipping and from commerce, the daughter of the sea, which was soon to
be vexed by the imperial decrees and orders in council of foreign
powers, and by some retaliatory legislation of our own. The highest
standard of remuneration for the services of lawyers was what we would
now deem low. Wirt, writing from Norfolk in 1805, considered two
thousand dollars to be laid up at the end of the year a fair reward for
the highest talents. One of the ablest leaders of the bar declared,
seven years later, that when he was worth fifty thousand dollars he
would retire from practice; while Wirt declared that he would retire as
soon as he had accumulated a capital which would yield the annual
interest of four thousand dollars. It is certain that all the members of
the bar of that day, as did all of the merchants, died poor with two
prominent exceptions; and when we reflect that those two men held the
front rank at the bar, one of them at least twenty years, the other near
thirty, and neither on his withdrawal could be deemed wealthy, the
inference is irresistible that, though now and then in that interval a
big fee came rolling in from some vessel caught in the act of violating
the embargo, or, at a much later date, from some prize case in the war
between Spain and her South American colonies, the rewards of legal
merit were low.

There was a branch of the old Bank of the United States, whose entire
capital, distributed over the Union, was only ten millions. There was as
yet, and fourteen years later, no daily paper. The _Herald_, then in its
ninth year, was published three times a week, and was the organ of the
democratic party. It was not until two years later that the _Ledger_
appeared in the field, under the lead of that able champion John Cowper,
and gave the federal flag to the breeze. More than fourteen years were
to elapse before a daily paper was established. The equinoctial storms
sadly worried our fathers. From the imperfect filling in of the streets
and wharves, the tides rose high; and then, if we would keep out of
sight St. Mark's,