I hear DICK FIBBINS, in this trying position, with the eyes of three Judges fixed on him, swearing at me under his breath in the most awful manner.  But why did he depend on me?  Why didn’t he get up the case himself?

Deprived at one blow of most of his precedents, “shorn”—­as the Breach of Promise Reports puts it—­“of its usual attractions,” FIBBINS’s speech becomes an impotent affair.  He has to quote such cases as he can remember, and as neither his memory nor his legal knowledge is great, he presents them all wrongly, and prematurely sits down.  I see PROSER’s wrinkled countenance illumined with an exultant smile.  Just as I am moving out of Court (FIBBINS has to “move” in Court), because I am desirous of avoiding FIBBINS’s wrath,—­though I feel that this fiasco is more his fault than mine,—­I hear the presiding judge (the mad one) say to the Defendant’s Counsel that he need not trouble to address them.  I know what that means—­judgment for the Defendant!

Chancing half-an-hour later to enter a Strand Restaurant, part of which, I regret to say, is also a drinking-bar, I am startled at beholding the identical form and features of FIBBINS himself.  He appears flushed—­has two companions with him, to whom he is talking excitedly.  I hear the words—­“idiot”—­“jackass of a pupil”—­“regular sell”—­and; but no, perhaps I had better not repeat all that I did hear.  I decide to seek refreshment elsewhere.

Over the subsequent scene in FIBBINS’s Chambers I prefer to draw a veil.  It is sufficient to say that I was obliged to leave FIBBINS, and thereafter received a solid half-year’s instruction in the Chambers of a learned Counsel who was not a briefless impostor.

I heard afterwards that he had added the story to his fund of legal dining-out anecdotes, and had considerably amplified it.  It came out in a shape which made FIBBINS a hero, myself an imbecile of a rather malicious kind, PROSER helplessly cowering under FIBBINS’s wealth of arguments, and the other two Judges reduced to admiring silence.  I take this opportunity of stating that if anybody “cowered” in Court on that memorable occasion, it was certainly not poor old PROSER.

* * * * *

THE “DISAPPOINTMENT OF DECEMBER.”

["It is too early yet (says the Telegraph) to announce the title of the latest of the Laureate’s plays, but this much may be said, that it is written partly in blank verse and partly in prose, that it is what is known in theatrical circles as a ‘a costume play,’ and that the scene is laid in England.  It may, however, interest sensitive dramatists to know that Lord TENNYSON is liberal enough to place the stage detail wholly in the competent hands of Mr. DALY.  He does not wince if a line is cut here and there, or protest if a scene or a speech has to be supplied.”]

[Illustration:  A cut here and there will be necessary.]