Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/121

 high, but they seemed high enough to scrape the low skies which arch so many of the grey days in the lake region. It was as long ago, I believe, as the time of Pythagoras that the law of the certain uncertainty of certainty was deduced for the humbling of human pride, and when my certainties with regard to Chicago proved all to be broken reeds, there were more gray days in that region of the intemperate zone than the meteorological records show. The little law office had a portrait of William Dean Howells on its walls, and in time the portraits of other writers, differing from those other law offices which prefer to be adorned with pictures of Chief Justice Marshall—a strong man, of course, who wrote some strong fiction, too, in his day—and of Hamilton and of Jefferson, indicating either a catholicity or a confusion of principle on the part of the occupying proprietor, of which usually he is not himself aware. There were a few law books, too, and on the desk a little digest of the law of evidence as affected by the decisions of the Ohio courts. I had the noble intention of mastering it, but I did not read in it very much, since for a long while there was no one to pay me for doing so, and I spent most of my hours at my desk over a manuscript of "The 13th District," a novel of politics I was then writing, looking up now and then and gazing out of the window at the blank rear walls of certain brick buildings which made a dreary prospect, even if one of them did bear, as I well remember, the bright and reassuring legend, "Money to Loan at 6 per cent."