Wine-and-dessert entertainment only lasts an hour.  Forbidding Bencher evidently feels that an hour is as much as he can possibly stand.  So we all depart, except the favoured nephew (or son), who, as I suspect, “remains to prey” on his uncle (or father), and probably to be invited in to the real feast which no doubt the Inn worthies are enjoying upstairs.

Next morning meet a legal friend, who asks, “When are you to be presented at Court?”

“Presented at Court?”—­I ask in surprise.

“Yes—­Court of Queen’s Bench—­ha! ha!  You’ll have to go one of these days in wig and gown to the Q.B.D., and inscribe your name in a big book, and bow to the Judges, and come out.”

“What’s the good of doing that?” I want to know.

“None whatever.  An old custom, that’s all.  A sort of legal fiction, you know.” (Query—­If a Queen’s Counsel writes a novel, isn’t that a real legal fiction?) “You’ll feel rather like a little boy going to a new school.  Judges look at you with an air of ’I say, you new feller, what’s your name?  Where do you come from?  What House are you in?—­then a good kick.  They can’t kick you, so they glare at you instead.  Interesting ceremony.  Ta, ta!”

It turns out as my friend says.  But previously there is the other little formality of purchasing the trailing garments of the Profession.  Go to a wig-and-gown-maker near the Law Courts.  Ask to see different kinds of wigs.

“We only make one kind,” replies the wig-man, pityingly.  “The Patent Ventilating Anticalvitium.  You’ll find it as light as a feather, almost.  Made of superfine ’orse-’air.”  He says this as if he never got his material from anything below the value of a Derby Winner.

“Why do you call it the Anticalvitium?” I ask.

“Because it don’t make the ’air fall off, Sir, as all other wigs do.”

Do they?  Another objection to the profession.  Wish I had known this before I began to grind for the Bar Exam.  Wig-man measures my head.

“Rather large size, Sir,” he remarks.  Says it as if I must have water on the brain at the very least.  “Middle Temple, I suppose?”—­he queries.  Why?  Somehow it would sound more flattering if he had supposed Inner Temple, instead of Middle.  Wonder if I shall ever be described as an “Outer barrister, of the Inner Temple, with Middling abilities.”  Is there a special cut of face belonging to the Inner Temple, another for the Middle (there is a “middle cut” in salmon, why not in the law?) and a third for Lincoln’s Inn?

Find, while I am meditating these problems, that I have been “suited” with a gown, also with a stock of ridiculous little linen flaps, which are called “bands.”  Think about “forbidding the bands,” but don’t know how to.

* * * * *

NOTE FOR THE NEW UNIONISM.

  “Union is Strength.”  Let lovers of communion
  Remember Strength (of language) is not Union!