Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 06.pdf/554

 Legal Reminiscences.

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LEGAL REMINISCENCES. By L. E. Chittenden. VIII. THE BEAUTIES OF CHANCERY. THE Lord High Chancellor is a creature of the past. He exists only in history and comic opera. He has gone into the beyond with the generation which endured • Jarndyce and Jarndyce, burned witches, hung men for larceny and imprisoned them for debt. The number of his surviving de scendants can be counted upon the fingers. They live because they are too insignificant to be destroyed. They are the survivals of an age that was essentially reptilian, and they are rapidly becoming fossil. At long inter vals of time they show signs of life, and, true to their ancestral conditions, continue to amuse the bar, burlesque justice and show into what unsounded depths of absurdity a legal institution has the capacity to fall. In my present summer vacation I have met with the most recent case with which chancery has had to deal. I do not care to give its title or venue, lest I might be sued for libel and enjoined from giving the truth in evidence. The reader will have to accept it upon its intrinsic evidence and my own endorsement of its truth. These were the facts. There was a wicked millionaire who owned a wood which he was preserving for a public park in his native town. A neigh bor who owned an adjacent wood had offered to sell to the millionaire, and the latter had agreed to buy it. The latter had a passion for preserving trees, for he believed that our descendants would repent in sack cloth for the sin of their fathers in stripping the hills and mountains of their verdure, their value and their beauty. The cutting of the neighbor's forest would go far towards destroying the beauty of the pro

jected park, and he expected to pay for it. and take the deed at his convenience. There was a speculator of the French persuasion who conceived the project of buy ing the neighbor's wood and selling it to the railroad. He waylaid the owner, and did not leave him until he had agreed to sell his trees for $1,400, to be removed from the land within two years, the Frenchman to give security for the payment of the pur chase money. The millionaire was exceedingly troubled in his mind when he heard of this sale. It was his hobby that the hills and the moun tains would not praise the Lord after they were stripped of their glorious apparel; and the cutting of this wood would ruin his pro jected park; so he went to the Frenchman and tried to buy his contract. He offered him five hundred dollars more for it than any two neighbors would say it was worth. The Frenchman thought his ship had come in; "Ah lak for»be reech man lak you own sef," he said. " Ah feel good! mos lak reech man alretty, pooty soon! Ah don' sell mah leetly trade for no cinq cents piastre, vat you call dollaire. You geef me five tousan' dollaire, den you geets mah leetly trade avec all dose big trees! Ah, no sell heem for someting mo small, not for one soumarkee, begar." Having found the Frenchman inflexible the millionaire applied to the owner, who said that as the Frenchman had failed to give the promised security he regarded him self as no longer bound to him by his con tract. Moreover, the contract was oral and could not be enforced. He therefore sold the 138 acres of land, with the wood and