Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 17.pdf/197

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THE GREEN BAG

THE LIGHTER SIDE A YOUNG lawyer in a temporary fit of rem iniscence sends us the following:— Shortly after hanging out my shingle, if one may so call telling the Janitor in a big office building to put one's name on the directory, Mrs. Brown with whom I had a slight ac quaintance, called. I wont say she was my first caller but she was well to the head of the list and my heart warmed when she told me she " had a case for me." It seems a friend of hers, Mr. Ohl, a German, who spoke little English had con fided to her that he had loaned a Mrs. Weiss $275.00 and had been unable to collect. I suggested that Mr. Ohl call on me and Mrs. Brown remarked she had called to arrange for that—would I let her have one of my cards for Mr. Ohl so he could find me? I did so. Three months later I happened to meet Mrs. Brown who stopped me in the street and chatted for awhile on several subjects. As I had never seen Mr. Ohl, I gently steered the conversation his way. "Oh yes," said Mrs. Brown, "he collected his money." "How?" I inquired. "Well," she said naively, "I gave him your card and told him to call on you. He took your card to Mrs. Weiss, you remem ber, she owed the money? He told her he had retained you and unless she paid at once, you would arrest her. Mrs. Weiss was much alarmed and almost collapsed but Mr. Ohl waited and when she revived, she gave him $200.00 cash and paid him the balance the following week. He was very lucky to get his money, was he not?" "Yes," I said. "He was very lucky." JUDGE R. W. CLIPFORD of Chicago is prover bial for his original humorous stories, and one of his latest is told of a corpulent German who came rushing into the circuit court one morning before court was called and said :— "I vant to git varrant for a man to kill a tog." "Well, my man, you don't come to this court to get warrants in cases of that kind. If you want the dog killed you should go to a police court," said the judge. The German started to leave, when the judge inquired in an interested manner:—

"Did the dog bite you?" "Yeas, he bit me." "Well! was the dog mad?" "Vas de tog madt? No, I vas madt." —Boston Record.

A JOVIAL, well-meaning Irishman, plaintiff in a suit for personal injuries against the city, in his eagerness to lay stress on the extent of his injuries, perpetrated an Irish "bull" which apparently did him no harm. After leading him, in direct examination, to tell of the cir cumstances under which the accident occurred, and his subsequent journey in an ambulance to his home, his counsel asked him, "Now, Mr. Murphy, were you able to sleep at all the night after this accident happened?" To which Murphy replied, with great emphasis. "No, sor, nor the night before!" "WHO are those students with books under their arms?" "They're taking up the law." "And what's the old man in a gown, back of that bench doing?" "Oh, he's laying it down." TEXAS' highest court has decided that in a trial for homicide it is error for the presiding judge to leave the court room and court house for eight or ten minutes while counsel is address ing the jury though he leave his daughter on the bench. A LAWYER was one morning sitting in his office in a small town in North Dakota, calmly smoking a corncob pipe and wondering whether he would have any clients that day, when his reveries were disturbed by a Swede, who walked in and addressed him:— "Meester liar, I bote some land of Gunder Larson and I vant a mortgage." "What is that? You bought land of Gunder Larson and want a mortgage drawn? ' ' "Yah, yah." "No, no," said the lawyer, "you want a deed." "No, no," said the simple-minded Swede, "I vant no deet. I bote land from Pader Paderson sum yahr ago and got a deet and anoder fellar coom long mit a mortgage and.