Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/137

 The task involved much labor, little had been accomplished, and they prevailed upon me, with the consent of the publishers, to come to their assistance. Thereafter the entire responsibility rested on me. Hollingsworth had completed three volumes of the reports, Platt ten, and I digested the remaining twenty-two volumes, arranged the book, saw it through the press and was permitted to write the preface. Published in 1879, it constituted my first contribution to the literature of the profession. About the time I entered upon this work, I became associated with the Weekly Notes of Cases, a lawyers' reporting journal, and aided in the preparation of each one of the forty-five volumes until it closed, having charge of the reports for one of the common pleas courts. There could have been no better training for the bench. For a time the publication was remunerative. It belonged to an association consisting of Albert A. Outerbridge, Judge James T. Mitchell, W. Wynne Wister, Henry Budd, Lawrence Lewis, Jr., and myself. Among the many reporters whom I had on my staff in the course of years, two showed unusual capacity—George Harrison Fisher, whom I later met on the council of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and Abraham M. Beitler, whom I later met on the bench. Fisher had social standing and the serious achievement of his life has been to maintain it unimpaired. Beitler, the son of a hotel keeper on Market Street, and the nephew of an old political war horse, Alderman David Beitler, became director of a department under Mayor Stuart, an acceptable judge in the Court of Common Pleas No. 1, and is now a partner of Samuel Dickson and has a lucrative corporation practice.

I likewise prepared four volumes of Pennypacker's Supreme Court Reports, for which I received, from Rees Welsh & Co., eight hundred dollars a volume, and in which I was much assisted by Albert B. Weimer, a graduate of Harvard University and a polished young fellow who has since made his mark in the city. After going upon the Rh