"These delays, Sir, are nothing," replied the lawyer, "absolutely nothing, I can assure you. Quite every day occurrences. I have known causes, all ready to be heard-briefs delivered to Counsel, parties attending at great expense and inconvenience,-stand over from day to day, and from week to week, until they are thrown over the 'Long Vacation:' then have to be set down again for hearing; with refreshers for Counsel:-yours is nothing to it, Sir, nothing." Refreshers, did you say?"

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"Fees to refresh their memory; in short, we call them, refreshers."

"Poor refreshment, I should think, indeed, Plowden, not the sort of refreshment I should like: but when do you really think that we shall come on?"

"I expect, to-morrow. We are in the paper for to-morrow. But there is no saying. No certainty, you see. It all depends upon circumstances. The leaders may be out of Court, or the Court may rise early; or a hundred other things may happen. But ours is in a train to

be heard to-morrow, as I said, and is in the fair course of being decided."

"I see, Plowden," replied the Client, "you Lawyers can't get on without a metaphor or two from us sportsmen. I suppose then that your turn-out to-morrow will be a sort of forensic tandem-one leader, and one wheeler, eh?"

"Just so, Captain," answered the man of Law, "except that in our vocabulary the language of the Road is reversed; the leaders take the shafts, and the wheelers go to the traces. Sometimes too," he added, stroking his chin between his thumb and fore-finger, "when the road is very heavy, we put on two or three wheelers."

"An expensive drag indeed, I see; and pray, what course is it that we are to run? not the T. Y. C. I understand, but the M. R. C. But, joking apart," he added more seriously, “let me ask you this one question, how does our case stand at the present moment; for although I did think once upon a time I had a clear idea about it, you Lawyers between you have made such an awful hash of it, I am all at sea again?"

Why the case is simply this". "Simply, eh? well, go on."

"We have brought 'money had and received' against Biddlestone; and he is suing us in Chancery for Discovery, and an Injunction, on the ground of waiver, acquiescence, and laches."

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"Stop, stop," ejaculated the client; "Discovery! Injunction! Waiver! Latches! and pray what, in the name of Fortune, is Latches?" Laches, Captain,—not latches—is a Norman word of frequent use in our law proceedings, and is derived from the French lachez; - it signifies remissness, or staleness, in making a demand. They say we ought to have brought our action sooner."

"The plain English then of it all is," said the Captain, preferring his vernacular tongue, "that I have two suits going on respecting the selfsame thing in two different courts; is that it?" Exactly."

"And that I am plaintiff in the one, and defendant in the other?"

D

"And, pray, why could we not have the whole matter fought out at once, in a single trial, in one and the same Court?"

"Oh that," answered Plowden, taking a pinch of snuff to clear his brain for the explanation he was about to offer, that, Captain Flood, is quite a different question. You see, Sir, that to understand that, you must comprehend the principles upon which a Court of Law proceeds. A Court of Law cannot deal effectually with some cases-"

"Cannot deal!" ejaculated Flood, "why, were not Courts of Justice established for the express purpose of effectually dealing-"

"Pardon me," rejoined Plowden importantly, "I am speaking of a Court of Common Law. I was saying that it cannot listen to any exclusively equitable ground of defence. It cannot do it. It cannot ransack the defendant's conscience by putting him on his oath. It cannot issue the plenipotentiary Injunction."

"That is to say," said Flood, shortly, who

without being convinced, now began to get heartily tired of the whole discussion," the Courts of Law cannot, simply because they will not, I suppose. But enough of this at present. Come, finish the bottle, we'll talk more about it to-morrow. I meet you at Westminster at ten. Is it so? But pray let me ask you, for mere curiosity, what that prodigious parcel is, which you are putting so carefully into your bag?"

"Merely Counsel's brief, which I am now on my way to deliver to him; and which he will have to sit up all night to get through."

"Poor wretch," thought Flood, "enough to kill him! But why call it a brief?' 'Twill be no brief business for him, poor soul, that I see; except in that sense."

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Why you know as well as I do, Sir: brief' means something short, does it not?"

"So I had always thought, Plowden, until now but in what sense does this deserve that epithet?"

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Why, Sir, it is a short synoptical abstract