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had looked upon, — the roads and streams and fields, nay, often the very houses and churches which were there when they lived and moved, — and it becomes an easy tran sition to carry yourself back through those centuries gone by, and live again with them the lives they there had spent. What an insight does not such an experience give one into what did in fact transpire on those scenes in those times, as compared with the impressions that the best and most dra matic of historians is able to afford. Now some impressions just such as these come to me sometimes, as I am searching my reports for precedents or expressions of legal prin ciples, and I have thought that back of them there may be something more than this mere castle-building which seems to be the first and most obvious fruit of such reflections. These books of Reports are an ancient graveyard. These cases are the once liv ing, now dead, actors on the world's stage. Their names are as the titles on the marble monuments. I lay my hand somewhat at random upon what seems to be a very dry case indeed. The record says that it was a suit upon a negotiable note for quite a large sum of money; a printed form was used, issued by the bank of A, in the city of X. The word A had been erased, and the note was made to read instead " payable at the bank of B, in the city of X ." It appears in evidence that all the parties con cerned transacted their business at the bank of B, and that the note was meant by all of them to have been filled up as the printed form with the mere written change in the place of payment indicated. Only by acci dent was the printed form of the bank of A used; and when observed by the party who was negotiating the loan, think ing to make the note as he knew all of the parties would have desired it to be, he took his pen and changed the word A to B . The drawer of the note was insol vent, and the endorser defended the suit on the note on the ground of the erasure and

change made in the place of payment after he had signed it. The court held that the endorser was excused from liability, and the plaintiff had besides the costs to pay. So the case appears in the books, and that is all we seem to know or care about the mat ter. That is all that concerns the searcher after a precedent, and that is all that con cerned, or perhaps ought to have concerned, the court. Now, to get at what I call "the romance of the law," — those things that follow after, but do not often appear from the record, — I have to tell you a mainly true though very common story, sufficiently disguised, how ever, to prevent identification of case or people, and I have changed the conjunc tion of real circumstance and case. There was a woman, the widow, of a pro fessional man, and her little children. Like all the rest of us, he had earned his money freely, and spending it in the same way in comfort and luxury, he had not hardened those he left behind against the possibilities of adversity. Well, there came, of course, the broken-up household, with all its wretched details of a public auction of trifles sacred by a thousand untellable ties, — mere chairs and tables, however, to those who bought them, — strangers in a home where he had once been lord and lover. Then the smaller dwelling and the narrower circumstances, where, nevertheless, there came after a while substantial comfort on what was left after death had stopped the source of plenty. Then came the investment of all the means of living in that negotiable note; the mere well-intended accident of the eras ure; and the judgment of the court, com pleting the wreck which death had left unfinished. Why should we ever, if we can help it, realize or dwell on the pain, the anx ious apprehension, the wakeful nights, the wasted health, and grinding care which play havoc while the law delays. Opinion day in the court of last resort has come at last. The judge has perhaps found the principles involved in this case of more than ordinary