had inherited his
hatred of Tammany Hall, and was unrelenting in his war upon it and its
handiwork, and he spoke of it and of its immediate downfall with the
bated breath of one who, though amazed at the wickedness of the thing
he fights, is not discouraged nor afraid. And he would listen to no
half-measures. Had not his grandfather quarrelled with Henry Clay, and
so shaken the friendship of a lifetime, because of a great compromise
which he could not countenance? And was his grandson to truckle and
make deals with this hideous octopus that was sucking the life-blood
from the city's veins? Had he not but yesterday distributed six
hundred circulars, calling for honest government, to six hundred
possible voters, all the way up Fourth Avenue?--and when some flippant
one had said that he might have hired a messenger-boy to have done it
for him and so saved his energies for something less mechanical, he
had rebuked the speaker with a reproachful stare and turned away in
silence.

Life was terribly earnest to young Holcombe, and he regarded it from
the point of view of one who looks down upon it from the judge's bench,
and listens with a frown to those who plead its cause. He was not
fooled by it; he was alive to its wickedness and its evasions. He would
tell you that he knew for a fact that the window man in his district
was a cousin of the Tammany candidate, and that the contractor who had
the cleaning of the street to do was a brother-in-law of one of the
Hall's sachems, and that the policeman on his beat had not been in the
country eight months. He spoke of these damning facts with the air of
one who simply tells you that much, that you should see how terrible
the whole thing really was, and what he could tell if he wished.

In his own profession he recognized the trials of law-breakers only as
experiments which went to establish and explain a general principle.
And prisoners were not men to him, but merely the exceptions that
proved the excellence of a rule. Holcombe would defend the lowest
creature or the most outrageous of murderers, not because the man was
a human being fighting for his liberty or life, but because he wished
to see if certain evidence would be admitted in the trial of such a
case. Of one of his clients the judge, who had a daughter of his own,
said, when he sentenced him, "Were there many more such men as you in
the world, the women of this land would pray to God to be left
childless." And when some