th any of the old ideals left. Should the Presidency be your ambition,
the fact of your having actually been born on American soil may be the
cause of a legal battle in the Supreme Court of the United States that
will pass into history. Meanwhile, as all apprenticeships must be
humble, you will be a sort of unofficial junior of this firm, sharing
the office business for the first year with Cresswell, and the second
year helping me with court practice in St. Peter. You can read in the
intervals and at home, and once or twice a week I should advise you to
attend lectures at the State University. I can see that your memory and
powers of assimilation are very vigorous, and the more quickly you
imbibe, and the more varied the quality, the better. All the odd types
of human nature you meet in this office won't do you any harm, either.
Study the American character above all things. Get in sympathy with it.
It is as opposite from the English as pole from pole, but you won't find
it a bad sort--the country's politics are the worst part of it, because
circumstances have forced them into the hands of a class of men that
make their living out of them, and whose natural destiny was
pocket-picking and the Rogues' Gallery--and if the best of us combine
one day to do you honor, we can carry you to places as distinguished as
any in your own country. Great and disinterested men have succeeded
against tremendous odds in times as parlous as these, and others have
the same opportunity here and now."

The judge wound up his homily with a little peroration on Abraham
Lincoln and then left Gwynne to the California codes. The large new
stone office building of which Judge Leslie was the chief tenant stood
at the corner of a street a block above Main; Gwynne glancing over the
top of his tome could see a procession of teams, men lounging in the
doorway of a grocery store, and the spars of fishing-boats waiting for
the tide. His mind played him a curious trick. Piccadilly was before him
with its great hotels, its splendid old stone houses upon which the fogs
and the grime of London had demonstrated their poetical mission, the
classic entrance to the Park, the crowds of smart men and women;
Piccadilly at eight on a summer's evening choked with broughams and
hansoms, in which the light mantles barely concealed the shoulders and
jewels of the women. He had loved the outside life of London, returning
to it from afar with an ever fresh and boyish pleasu