Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/213

 I did not have a positive opinion as to how it ought to be decided. I had heard that Joseph T. Pratt, an unprepared judge, who died early, before sitting in jury trials sent for the papers and studied the cases. This course occurred to me, but upon the advice of Fell, I never resorted to it and very seldom saw the pleadings. Nor was it my method in the trial of causes to attempt to recall to memory earlier decisions. The judge who remembers that the case before him was decided at such a time and in such a report is mentally traveling by rote and is sure to be lost in the mazes. No two cases are ever exactly alike and his task is, depending upon principles with which he is familiar, to apply them accurately to the facts which come up before him. As in all reasoning, the most important part of the process is properly to analyze the facts. Then the classification naturally follows.

John I. Clark Hare presided over the court. It was a privilege to sit on the bench with him and it was my good fortune to have been thrown into a court where the associations were the most desirable and the most likely to prove stimulating. He was a gentleman. Then, nearing the decline of life, he had an experience which began in young manhood. His works upon contracts and upon the constitution had given him national and international reputation, and no jurist in the country was more widely and favorably known. He was spare in frame, ready in tongue and lovable in disposition. His methods were disorderly. He would grow interested in the arguments, pile up the paper books to the right and left of him, suddenly leave the court on some impulse, and never think of them again unless his attention was called to them. On one occasion he threw his quarterly warrant for $1,750 into the waste paper basket, where it was later found by one of the tipstaves. This want of orderly arrangement extended to his mental processes. In stating a proposition, all of the qualifications occurred to him and no man was Rh