judge often stumbled. Had she any more real right to the property than
the sharks who were trying to steal it from her? Who had any right to
this abandoned field that for fifty years had been waiting for an absent
heir to announce himself? Did it really belong to the Public? When he
got thus far in his speculation, the judge always pulled himself up with
a start. That wasn't his business. He was bound to administer the
antiquated and curious system of laws concerning the bequest of property
with a serious sense of their sacredness whether he felt it or not. They
seemed to be an essential part of the crazy structure of society that
must not be questioned, least of all by a probate judge! If men had
devised these unreal rules and absurd regulations, probably there was
some divine necessity for them beyond his human insight. Judge Orcutt
never got farther than this point in his speculations. With a sigh he
dropped the Clark case, and the next morning sent for the two women to
appear in his court.

It did not take him long this time to discover that they were singularly
without good friends or advisers. They had no known relatives, no one
who could be expected to take a friendly interest in their affairs and
trusted to manage the business wisely. In earlier days Judge Orcutt
would have tried to find, in such a case, some able and scrupulous young
lawyer to perform the necessary function, somebody like himself who
would have a chivalrous regard for the defenseless condition of the two
women. Either that breed of lawyers had run out, or the judge was
becoming less confiding. For latterly, since the introduction of trust
companies, he had more than once put such cases in charge of these
impersonal agents. Trust companies were specially designed to meet two
pressing human wants,--permanence and honesty. They might not always be
efficient, for they were under such strict legal supervision that they
must always take the timid course, and they charged highly for their
services. But they could not very well be dishonest, nor die! They would
go on forever, at least as long as there was the institution of private
property and an intricate code of laws to safeguard it. Thus the judge
argued to himself again in considering the plight of these Clarks, and
decided to use the Washington Trust Company of B----, whose officers he
knew....

After explaining all this in simple terms to Mrs. Clark, he proposed to
her that her niece's intere