in fishing, hunting, dancing, and
playing the fiddle, instead of working on his father's farm. As he grew
older he liked sport too much and work too little to make a living. He
tried store-keeping and failed through neglect of his business. He
married a wife whose father gave him a farm, but he failed with this,
too, fishing and fiddling when he should have been working, and in two
years the farm was sold. Then he went back to store-keeping, and with
the same result. The trouble was his love for the fiddle and the
fishing-line, which stood very much in the way of business. He was too
lazy and fond of good company and a good time to make a living for
himself and his wife.

The easy-going fellow was now in a critical situation. He had to do
something if he did not want to starve, so he borrowed some old
law-books and began to read law. Six weeks later he applied to an old
judge for a license to practise in the courts. The judge questioned him
and found that he knew nothing about the law; but young Henry pleaded
with him so ardently, and promised so faithfully to keep on studying,
that the judge gave him the license and he hung out his shingle as a
lawyer.

Whatever else Patrick Henry might be good for, people thought that to
call himself a lawyer was a mere laughing matter. An awkward, stooping,
ungainly fellow, dressed roughly in leather breeches and yarn stockings,
and not knowing even how to pronounce the king's English correctly, how
could he ever succeed in a learned profession? As a specimen of his
manner of speech at that time we are told that once, when denying the
advantages of education, he clinched the argument by exclaiming,
"Nait'ral parts are better than all the larnin' on airth."

As for the law, he did not know enough about it to draw up the simplest
law-paper. As a result, he got no business, and was forced, as a last
resort, to help keep a tavern which his father-in-law possessed at
Hanover Court-House. And so he went on for two or three years, till
1763, when the celebrated case came up. Those who knew him might well
look on it as a joke when the word went round that Patrick Henry was
going to "plead against the parsons." That so ignorant a lawyer should
undertake to handle a case which all the old lawyers had refused might
well be held as worthy only of ridicule. They did not know Patrick
Henry. It is not quite sure that he knew himself. His father sat on the
bench as judge, but what he thought of h