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of them judicial) may be laid to my charge. During most of my life I have had a strong and to me unaccountable propensity to metrical trans gression. Over and over again have I suffered the pains and penalties of poetic guilt. Besides a score or two of convictions, I have had many trials and narrow escapes. But even now I am not a hardened offender, for a bashful hesitation always tempers my gallantry with the Muses. My resignation was the result of overwork, and overwork was the result of my ignorance of the law, together with an apprehension that I might be ignorant when I supposed I was not. To ad minister law it is desirable, though not always necessary, to know it. The labor of learning rapidly on a large scale, and the constant strain to shun mistakes in deciding cases, shattered my nerves and impaired my health. In its effect on the deciding faculty, the apprehension of igno rance counts for as much as ignorance itself. My mind is slow to embrace a firm faith in its sup posed knowledge. However ignorant a judge may be, whenever he thoroughly believes he understands the law of his case, he is ready to decide it, — no less ready than if he had the knowledge which he thinks he has. And he will often decide correctly, for the law may be as he supposes, whether he knows it or not. My trouble is, to become fully persuaded that I know. I seem not to have found the law out in a reliable way. I detect so many mistakes committed by others, and convict myself of error so often, that most of my conclusions on difficult questions are only pro visional. I reconsider, revise, scrutinize, revise the scrutiny, and scrutinize the revision. But my faith in the ultimate efficiency of work is un bounded. The law is too often unknown, but is never unknowable. I finally settle down, painful deliberation ceases, and I doubt no more until I am engaged in writing out the opinion of the court, when I discover perhaps that the thing is all wrong. My colleagues are called again into consultation; we reconsider the case, and decide it the -other way. Then I am satisfied : for when I know the law is not on one side, it must be on the other. I remained in private life until January, 1887, when on the death of Chief-Justice Jackson I became his successor. My term of office will expire with the year 1892. I will now recount briefly the principal events

of my personal history prior to the beginning of my judicial career. I was born in the woods, amid the mountains of northeastern Georgia, July 3, 1827. My native county, Rabun, had then been organized but seven or eight years, up to which period it was the wilderness home of Indians, — the Cherokees. At eleven years of age I commenced writing in the office of my father, who at that time was a farmer without any lands and tenements, and with very few goods and chattels. He lived on a rented homestead, one mile from Clayton, the county town, and was clerk of three courts, — the superior, inferior, and ordinary. He was a man of strong intellect, fair information, and some business experience. He had been sheriff of the county. A more sterling character was not in the world, — certainly not in that large group called the middle class, to which he belonged. Loyal to truth, he scorned sham, pretence, and mendacity. He was a native of North Carolina, as was my mother also. His blood was English and Irish combined; hers German. I gradually acquired skill in office business, and more and more of it fell to my share, till at length I could give all of it competent attention. In this way, and by observing what was done and said in the courts, I contracted a relish for law, and became familiar with legal documents and forms of procedure. The statutes, strange to say, were pleasant reading, and at intervals I read them with assiduity. Of course, my comprehension of them was imperfect, and still more imperfect was my mastery of the Constitution of the State and that of the United States. But I had a boy-s acquaint ance with all these, or with most of them, by the time I was seventeen. At that age I borrowed Blackstone and some other elementary books, and entered upon the study of law in earnest. There was no resident lawyer in the county; so I read alone, going once or twice to an adjoining county to be examined by some attorneys who took a friendly interest in directing my studies. One of these was the late Judge Underwood, to whose memory I have from the bench paid a tribute in such words as I could command in an extem poraneous address,1 but not such as he deserved. Having prepared myself crudely for admis sion, I was admitted to the bar in April, 1846, shortly before I was nineteen. Though for the 1 See 83 Ga. 817.