It was an immemorial custom in Bloomsbury for the youth who had aspirations for a legal career to “read law” in Judge Bradley’s office.  Two of his students had dropped their books to take up rifles, and they came not back to their places.  They were forgotten, save once a year, upon Decoration Day, when Judge Bradley made eloquent tribute above their graves.  Upon such times Judge Bradley always shed tears, and always alluded to the tears with pride.  Indeed, his lachrymal ability was something of which he had much right to be proud, it being well known in the legal profession that one’s fees are in direct proportion to his ability to weep.  Judge Bradley could always weep at the right time before a Jury, and this facility won him many a case.  Through no idle whim had public sentiment, even after the incident of the substitute, confirmed him in his position as the leading lawyer of Bloomsbury.

It was therefore predetermined that Edward Franklin should go into the office of Judge Bradley to begin his law studies, after he had decided that the profession of the law was the one likely to offer him the best career.  In making his decision, Franklin was actuated precisely as are many young men who question themselves regarding their career.  He saw the average results of the lives of others in a given calling, and conceived, without consulting in most jealous scrutiny his own natural fitnesses and preferences, that he might well succeed in that calling because he saw others so succeeding.  Already there were two dozen lawyers in Bloomsbury, and it was to be questioned whether they all did so well as had Judge Bradley in the hog-stealing epoch of the local history.  Yet it was necessary for him to take up something by way of occupation, and it resolved itself somewhat into a matter of cancellation.  For the profession of medicine he had a horror, grounded upon scenes of contract surgery upon the fields of battle.  The ministry he set aside.  From commerce, as he had always seen it in his native town, twelve hours a day of haggling and smirking, he shrank with all the impulses of his soul.  The abject country newspaper gave him no inkling of that fourth estate which was later to spring up in the land.  Arms he loved, but there was now no field for arms.  There were no family resources to tide him over the season of experiment, and, indeed, but for a brother and a sister, who lived in an adjoining farming community, he had no relatives to be considered in his plans.  Perforce, then, Franklin went into the law, facing it somewhat as he had the silent abattis, as with a duty to perform.  Certainly, of all students, Judge Bradley had never had a handsomer, a more mature, or a more reluctant candidate than this same Edward Franklin, late captain in the United States Army, now getting well on into his twenties, grave, silent, and preoccupied, perhaps a trine dreamy.  He might or might not be good material for a lawyer; as to that, Judge Bradley did not concern himself.  Young men came into his office upon their own responsibility.