Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 04.pdf/148

 The Romance of the Law. excused by the court on the ground that it was merely from the force of habit, and a wife hysterical and yet masculine and mus cular enough to be able to punch her lord and master in the breast several times. Nevertheless, I have in mind a case whose record makes it very like to this, and yet through whose outside history have run the finest lines of the romantic and sentimental; where all the impulses of love, hate, mean ness, tenderness, courage, self-sacrifice, and revenge have played on human hearts until some of them have hardened like adamant, and others, like withered flowers, have lost all the fragrance and bloom which by right of living Nature had given them a claim to own. Now, before I try to explain the practical import (for such an aim I have) of what I fear you may be disposed to regard as a too transcendental theory of the workings of the law, I turn for a few moments from that class of cases whose faults seem to me to consist in the sense of inadequacy with which their results impress you, to another class of cases for whose consequences also you must ordi narily look beyond the record, but the blame for which is the more readily to be put where lies the responsibility, and the remedy for which can be suggested with at least a greater freedom from the apprehension lest in trying to cure one ill you invite the possibility of creating others. I could, of course, by merely turning over the pages of some of these books which lie before me while I write, find case after case whose proceedings show that when at last it came to judgment it had reached a hoary age; but both you and I have too many such in constant remembrance which have never gotten into the books, or if there have coyly concealed their ages, to make research in the books of reports at all necessary. I recall at this moment a case which started in the year 1827 with a dispute over a sum of about $ 1,200, which had been put in the hands of the general receiver as a sort of stakeholder. Only dim tradition and the 17

1 29

most sparse and unsatisfactory entries from time to time on the order book, and thin and faded notes for decrees filed among the few papers that have survived through all these years, give partial information of what oc curred when the old case was young. In 1882, however, the fund had accumulated with compound interest until it had reached to near §15,000, and by the merest good luck it was saved. Had action been delayed six months longer the $15,000 would not have been worth 15,000 cents to court or owner. Then a grandson (with several greats to him) of one of the primeval litigants looms up out of the dark, and discovers this accumulated and long- neglected fund. His first and wis est step was to make it safe, which he suc ceeded in doing. Then came the revived litigation, which had stopped years before because, apparently, there was nobody left with strength enough to litigate. All the parties to the suit were long since dead; all the lawyers, and there were many of them, who had figured in the case were dead; all the judges, except one, who had ever made a decree in the case were dead, and that one, venerable man, was long since off the bench; all the clerks who had ever recorded decrees, and all the commis sioners who had made reports, were dead; the very court-house in which the case had been originally heard had been pulled down, and a new court-house, facing in another di rection, had been built on the old site; and even the clerk's office in which the case had had its first birth (rule) day had been de stroyed and a new clerk's office built, and that in its turn had become old. The case had turned and twisted in a tired sort of way on its docket so long that it had lost its original name, and by way of clerk and law yer had taken on some newer name, so that its own father would not have recognized it. Under cover of this, and weary with being called at in an unknown tongue, or at least in an unknown name, it had at last sneaked off the docket altogether, under the pretence of some seven-year rule or other. Well, the