admitted without
any advance of stock, had become gradually more and more wealthy.

'Their association,' said Alan, and the little flight was received
with some applause, 'resembled the ancient story of the fruit which was
carved with a knife poisoned on one side of the blade only, so that
the individual to whom the envenomed portion was served, drew decay and
death from what afforded savour and sustenance to the consumer of the
other moiety.' He then plunged boldly into the MARE MAGNUM of accompts
between the parties; he pursued each false statement from the waste-book
to the day-book, from the day-book to the bill-book, from the bill-book
to the ledger; placed the artful interpolations and insertions of the
fallacious Plainstanes in array against each other, and against the
fact; and availing himself to the utmost of his father's previous
labours, and his own knowledge of accompts, in which he had been
sedulously trained, he laid before the court a clear and intelligible
statement of the affairs of the copartnery, showing, with precision,
that a large balance must, at the dissolution, have been due to his
client, sufficient to have enabled him to have carried on business on
his own account, and thus to have retained his situation in society as
an independent and industrious tradesman. 'But instead of this justice
being voluntarily rendered by the former clerk to his former master,--by
the party obliged to his benefactor,--by one honest man to another,--his
wretched client had been compelled to follow his quondam clerk, his
present debtor, from court to court; had found his just claims met with
well-invented but unfounded counter-claims, had seen his party shift
his character of pursuer or defender, as often as Harlequin effects his
transformations, till, in a chase so varied and so long, the unhappy
litigant had lost substance, reputation, and almost the use of reason
itself, and came before their lordships an object of thoughtless
derision to the unreflecting, of compassion to the better-hearted, and
of awful meditation to every one who considered that, in a country where
excellent laws were administered by upright and incorruptible judges, a
man might pursue an almost indisputable claim through all the mazes of
litigation; lose fortune, reputation, and reason itself in the chase,
and now come before the supreme court of his country in the wretched
condition of his unhappy client, a victim to protracted justice, and t