I never made
any request of him for any appointment within his gift and
he was beset behind and before by the demands of men he was
unable to gratify, to many of whom he conceived himself under
great obligation. It should be stated too that in Mr. Blaine's
time the Members from Massachusetts older in the service than
myself had very important places indeed. So it was hardly
just to increase the number of important Committee appointments
from our State.

But it happened to me by great good fortune that I had an
opportunity, of which I was very glad, to accomplish something
by reason of my place on each Committee on which I served,
which I could not have accomplished without it.

An amusing piece of good fortune happened to me at the beginning
of my service. I was placed, as I said, on the Committee
on the Revision of the Laws. My law practice had been in
the interior of the Commonwealth. So I had little knowledge
of United States jurisprudence. I determined in order to
fit myself for my new duties to make a careful study of the
statutes and law administered in the United States Courts.
I took with me to Washington a complete set of the Reports
of the Supreme Court of the United States and purchased Abbott's
Digest of those decisions, then just published. The first
evening after I got settled I spent in reading the opinions
of the Supreme Court. I took the Digest beginning with the
letter A, reading the abstracts, and then reading the cases
referred to. I got as far as Adm and read the cases relating
to admiralty practice. The next morning the Speaker announced
his Committees and the House adjourned. After the adjournment,
Judge Poland, Chairman of the Committee on the Revision of
the Laws, called the Committee together and laid before them
a letter he had just received from Mr. Justice Miller of
the Supreme Court, asking for a change in the law in regard
to monitions for summoning defendants in Admiralty. The change
had been made necessary by some recent decisions of the Court.
The other members of the Committee looked at each other in
dismay. None of them was familiar with the question, or knew
at all what it was all about. I then stated to them the difficulty,
giving them the names of the cases and the volumes where they
were found. They were all quite astonished to find a man
from the country, of whom probably none of them had ever heard
before, having the law of Admiralty at his tongue's end.
I