“Mr. Scapgoat,” said my wife, shaking her fist at him (for she is a woman of no small spirit), “if you don’t leave this ground I’ll have you pushed out with pitchforks, I will—­you and your beggarly blackamoor yonder.”  And, suiting the action to the word, she clapped a stable fork into the hands of one of the gardeners, and called another, armed with a rake, to his help, while young Tug set the dog at their heels, and I hurrahed for joy to see such villany so properly treated.

“That’s sufficient, ain’t it?” said Mr. Scapgoat, with the calmest air in the world.  “Oh, completely,” said the lawyer.  “Mr. Tuggeridge, we’ve ten miles to dinner.  Madam, your very humble servant.”  And the whole posse of them rode away.

LAW LIFE ASSURANCE.

We knew not what this meant, until we received a strange document from Higgs, in London—­which begun, “Middlesex to wit.  Samuel Cox, late of Portland Place, in the city of Westminster, in the said county, was attached to answer Samuel Scapgoat, of a plea, wherefore, with force and arms, he entered into one messuage, with the appurtenances, which John Tuggeridge, Esq., demised to the said Samuel Scapgoat, for a term which is not yet expired, and ejected him.”  And it went on to say that “we, with force of arms, viz, with swords, knives, and staves, had ejected him.”  Was there ever such a monstrous falsehood? when we did but stand in defence of our own; and isn’t it a sin that we should have been turned out of our rightful possessions upon such a rascally plea?

Higgs, Biggs, and Blatherwick had evidently been bribed; for would you believe it?—­they told us to give up possession at once, as a will was found, and we could not defend the action.  My Jemmy refused their proposal with scorn, and laughed at the notion of the will:  she pronounced it to be a forgery, a vile blackamoor forgery; and believes, to this day, that the story of its having been made thirty years ago, in Calcutta, and left there with old Tug’s papers, and found there, and brought to England, after a search made by order of Tuggeridge junior, is a scandalous falsehood.

Well, the cause was tried.  Why need I say anything concerning it?  What shall I say of the Lord Chief Justice, but that he ought to be ashamed of the wig he sits in?  What of Mr. ——­ and Mr. ——­, who exerted their eloquence against justice and the poor?  On our side, too, was no less a man than Mr. Serjeant Binks, who, ashamed I am, for the honor of the British bar, to say it, seemed to have been bribed too:  for he actually threw up his case!  Had he behaved like Mr. Mulligan, his junior—­and to whom, in this humble way, I offer my thanks—­all might have been well.  I never knew such an effect produced, as when Mr. Mulligan, appearing for the first time in that court, said, “Standing here upon the pidestal of secred Thamis; seeing around me the arnymints of a profission I rispict; having before me a vinnerable