An unwritten law in the office was that neither he nor his partners should ever accept a case if their client were in the wrong, or guilty.  But this very fact made wrongdoers the more anxious to secure him, knowing it would create the impression at once that they were innocent.

A story which went the rounds of legal circles in Boston and finally was published in the “Boston Sunday Times,” shows how he was cleverly fooled by a pick-pocket The man charged with the crime came to Colonel Conwell to get him to take the case.  So well did he play the part of injured innocence that Colonel Conwell was completely deceived and threw himself heart and soul into the work of clearing him.  When the case came up for trial, the lawyer and client sat near together in the court room, and Colonel Conwell made such an earnest and forceful plea in behalf of the innocent young man and the harm already done him by having such a charge laid at his door that it was at once agreed the case should be dismissed, by the District Attorney’s consent.  So lawyer and client walked out of court together, happy and triumphant, to Colonel Conwell’s office, where the pick-pocket paid Colonel Conwell his fee out of the lawyer’s own pocketbook which he had deftly abstracted during the course of the trial.

The incident caused much amusement at the time, and it was a long while before Colonel Conwell heard the last of it.

Into work for temperance he went heart and soul, not only in speech but in deed.  Though he never drank intoxicating liquor himself, he could never see a man under its baneful influence but that heart and hand went out to help him.  Many a reeling drunkard he took to his Somerville home, nursed all night, and in the morning endeavored with all his eloquence to awaken in him a desire to live a different life.  Deserted wives and children of drunkards came to him for aid, and many of the free law cases were for those wronged through the curse of drink.

Friend always of the workingman, he was persistently urged by their party to accept a nomination for Congress.  But he as persistently refused.  But he worked hard in politics for others.  He managed one campaign in which General Nathaniel P. Banks was running on an independent ticket, and elected him by a large majority.  His name was urged by Senators Charles Sumner and Henry Wilson for the United States Consulship at Naples, the lectures he had given at Cambridge, England, on Italian history having attracted so much favorable comment by the deep research they showed, and the keen appreciation of Italian character.  He was considered an expert in contested election cases and he frequently appeared before the Legislature on behalf of cities and towns on matters over which it had jurisdiction.

Mr. Higgins, who knew him personally, writing of these busy days in “Scaling the Eagle’s Nest,” says: