Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 01.pdf/564

Rh courts are not held, the students exercise their oratorical powers in the conferences, but, above all, in the cafes and beer saloons. It is there that you can frequently hear some hot debate on law or politics between two students. I have also assisted at some very fine informal discussions in students' rooms, where the arguments were good, the flow of elocution easy, and the reading displayed broad. But what the French student lacks is training in parliamentary law. He has but a very faint idea of it in his youth, and that he continues in his mature years to have a vague idea on the importance of the matter is proved by the worse than schoolboyish indecorum of the proceedings in the Chamber of Deputies. A little less Demos thenes and a little more Cushing would do them no harm. When eleven o'clock strikes in the dome of the Sorbonne most of the students hasten to their lunch or dtjeufier a la fourchette, and when that meal is despatched they stroll lei surely to their habitual cafe. The most popu lar of the day cafes are the Source, frequented by Parisians, South Americans, a few Luxembourgers, a colony of Basques, and a sprink ling of other nationalities; the Voltaire, a respectable solid establishment, with a good stock of papers; the Cluny, the Anglo-Saxon headquarters, though there are numerous Rou manians in the billiard-room upstairs; the Vachette, the " swell " cafe of the quarter, where coffee costs just one cent more than in the other coffee-houses on the Boulevard St. Michel, and where the women are just one shade older and better dressed. It is in these resorts that the Parisian student takes his noon cup of coffee, or sips his mazagran, or slowly quaffs his liqueur. Here he reads the morning news, or discusses a question of study with his friends, or plays a game of sixty-six, ecarte, baccarat, or whist, or tries his hand at checkers or chess. At about 1.30 he leaves and goes about his regular occupation. — New York Times.

ODD OFFENCES. TN an old number of " Chambers' Journal" .*- the writer came across an article with the above title; and a number of the cases therein referred to are sufficiently interest ing and amusing, he thinks, to " entertain" the readers of the " Green Bag." Lovers of liberty as they were, our fore fathers had but little patience with propound ed of novel notions. When Henry Crabb, suddenly awaking to the fact that success in business was not to be attained without much lying and deceit, forswore his calling of haberdasher of hats, and betook himself to playing the hermit and practising vege tarianism, he was put in the stocks, ousted from one refuge to another, and finally lodged in prison, to prevent others imitating his evil example.

"Sir George Carteret," says Pepys, " showed me a gentleman coming by in his coach who hath been sent for up out of Lincolnshire. I think he says he is a justice of the peace there that the council have laid by the heels here, and here lies in a messenger's hands, for saying that a man and his wife are but one person, and so ought to pay but twelvepence for both to the Poll Bill, by which others were led to do the like; and so here he lies a prisoner." It does not do to be in advance of one's day. In 1618 a Weymouth butcher was amerced in three shillings and fourpence for killing a bull unbaited, and putting the flesh thereof unto sale. About the same time certain good citizens of Worcester presented a formal complaint against John