Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 18.pdf/314

 •AN OLD FASHIONED LAW OFFICE rack extending to the ceiling, on which rested heavy tin boxes, securely padlocked, containing documents relating to estates or great law suits. Each had painted on it in big black letters, many of which were nearly obliterated by time, the name of the client or suit. One was there with "Gridson v. Gridson," faintly decipherable on it. It contained the dusty records of a standing chancery suit commenced over forty years previously and not yet decided. Every day on my way to and from the office I passed a row of four-story brick dwellings, sixteen in the row, uninhabited, with crumbling shutters at the lower windows, and not a pane of glass within reach of a rock left in the upper sashes. Dismal, gloomy, rat-infested, specterhaunted things! They were the bone of contention in Gridson v. Gridson. Another box contained the verbose and technical reports, made a half century before by legal agents in Russia, concerning the missing heir to one of the noblest titles of England. They had led to no discovery, the title became extinct, and with the heir has long since been forgotten. The office was in New Square, leading out from Lincoln's Inn Fields. Around the small green enclosure were ranged dingy, three-story brick buildings, not one of which was less than a century old. It was "New" Sciuare, however, compared with the "Fields." There buildings boasting three or four hundred years were the rule. Every one of these buildings, both in the Square and the Fields, was comprised solely of law offices. Many had been kept in good repair and equipped with modern furnishings and fittings. Others more con servative had known nothing for years, save the broom and the duster. Probably among them all none had been left so long undisturbed as ours. Mr. Robbins once related that when he was first engaged (thirty years before) the chief clerk told him that no repairs, changes, nor painting had been done in our rooms for over twenty years!

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The sweeping and cleaning in all of these offices was performed by charwomen, always old and often decrepit, who came in the early morning and crept away be fore the first clerk arrived. There was a legend current in our office, that our char woman was over a hundred years old when "Old Pierce" (the term is not mine) died. Anyway, her name could be traced back on the disbursement books for many years. At the time I was in the office she had not been seen by any eye connected with the firm for over six years. Her wages, to gether with money to defray her little scrawled bill for soap, brushes, or candles, was left every Saturday on the mantel, under an old metal clock which had not ticked for generations. One morning I went to the office at eight o'clock. Our regular time was ten, but I had got behind with some work which was needed. Then, and then only during my four years' service, I saw our charwoman. To my intense surprise I saw, instead of an aged, feeble old woman, a young and rather pretty girl of eighteen. She seemed much embarrassed, as indeed I was myself, being considerably younger than she, but after a few sheepish remarks, between long inter vals of silence, she stammeringly asked me to say nothing of having seen her there. I did not promise, being thoroughly satu rated with the importance of everything connected with our office, so a day or two later I told Mr. Robbins. He questioned me closely and seriously, and within a week he had himself investigated the matter The girl, with two younger sisters, had been left destitute orphans, and were cared for by their grandmother, our aged char woman, whose sole support was the trifling pittance she found each week under the clock. Three years before the old woman had died, and upon this fifteen year old girl had devolved the care of the little ones. She had continued her grandmother's cleaning-up job, fearing every day that the change would be discovered and her little income