Judge Leslie returned on the following day, and, sending for Gwynne at once, announced that he was ready to settle down for the winter. A partner attended to the business of the office, and the judge shut himself up with Gwynne in the large light room containing his fine law library, and examined his promising pupil. Gwynne was well read in the English Common Law, and in Comparative Jurisprudence, particularly in the history of treaties and the comity of nations. So much he had regarded as necessary to the education of a future cabinet minister.
Judge Leslie sketched out a course of study which embraced Cooley and Kent on Constitutional Law, compilations of Leading Cases, Story on Contracts, the California Codes, Civil, Penal, and Political, and Corporation Law. "The money is in the last," he remarked, dryly, "but even if you never succumb to these monstrous corporations, more aptly named cormorants, the more you know about their methods and needs the better, should you ever be called upon to fight them; and I have an idea that that is just where you will show your strength. All the great statesmen of this country have been great lawyers, and the great statesman of the future is going to be the lawyer that checks the power of unscrupulous capital, without at the same time delivering the country over to the mercies of that equally unscrupulous tyranny the labor-union. There is a solution somewhere and some man is going to find it. I don't see why you should not be the man. I have followed your career very carefully—you have always interested me. You come here with a magnificent political training, a mind uncorrupted by a lifetime of contact with the contemptible methods of machine politics, and a really great ambition. Your eyes are wide open. I don't see why you should make any mistakes, particularly as you have four good years in which to ponder the great question before committing yourself. Four years are a long span. No man can tell what may happen in that time, what new party may evolve. All you can do is to watch events and be ready for the forelock when time shakes it at you. If it so happens that you can insidiously mould a new party meanwhile, so much the better. The wisest and most suggestive writer on our national life is a Briton. I see no reason why England should not send us a statesman—in the old sense. God knows, all that we have now are a bitter disappointment to those of us with any of the old ideals left. Should the Presidency be your ambition, the fact of your having actually been born on American soil may be the cause of a legal battle in the Supreme Court of the United States that will pass into history. Meanwhile, as all apprenticeships must be humble, you will be a sort of unofficial junior of this firm, sharing the office business for the first year with Cresswell, and the second year helping me with court practice in St. Peter. You can read in the intervals and at home, and once or twice a week I should advise you to attend lectures at the State University. I can see that your memory and powers of assimilation are very vigorous, and the more quickly you imbibe, and the more varied the quality, the better. All the odd types of human nature you meet in this office won't do you any harm, either. Study the American character above all things. Get in sympathy with it. It is as opposite from the English as pole from pole, but you won't find it a bad sort—the country's politics are the worst part of it, because circumstances have forced them into the hands of a class of men that make their living out of them, and whose natural destiny was pocket-picking and the Rogues' Gallery—and if the best of us combine one day to do you honor, we can carry you to places as distinguished as any in your own country. Great and disinterested men have succeeded against tremendous odds in times as parlous as these, and others have the same opportunity here and now."
The judge wound up his homily with a little peroration on Abraham Lincoln and then left Gwynne to the California codes. The large new stone office building of which Judge Leslie was the chief tenant stood at the corner of a street a block above Main; Gwynne glancing over the top of his tome could see a procession of teams, men lounging in the doorway of a grocery store, and the spars of fishing-boats waiting for the tide. His mind played him a curious trick. Piccadilly was before him with its great hotels, its splendid old stone houses upon which the fogs and the grime of London had demonstrated their poetical mission, the classic entrance to the Park, the crowds of smart men and women; Piccadilly at eight on a summer's evening choked with broughams and hansoms, in which the light mantles barely concealed the shoulders and jewels of the women. He had loved the outside life of London, returning to it from afar with an ever fresh and boyish pleasure, the keener perhaps because he knew that all doors were open to him and that he was one of the great lions, not of those for whom the stranger must search "Who's Who" upon his return from a function where half the guests had made their little mark. He saw the lofty towers with their delicate tracery, cutting the smoke on the banks of the Thames, the little room below where he had made men, old and bored and suspicious, listen to him; the more confident in his power to command their attention because he knew that they had read and discussed, agreed with and denounced, his sound contributions to colonial literature. The scene dissolved into a wave of homesickness that made him choke and spring to his feet. Then he swore at himself and returned to his codes.
When Judge Leslie learned that Hiram Otis's law library had been moved out to Lumalitas he suggested that Gwynne should read at home until he had mastered the laws governing the State of California, and the student was far better satisfied out there in the quiet and the fresh air of his veranda. When a point needed expounding, a horseback ride into Rosewater was not an unwelcome diversion. His will had triumphed in its first bout with memory, so subtly liberated by the written word, and before three days of close study had passed he had the sensation of having found a new and individual patch upon which squarely to plant his feet. The future seemed more definite, more assured; moreover, his avid brain, its energies too long in abeyance, settled upon the new and absorbing study—it was eight years since he had opened a law-book, although he had forgotten little he had read at that plastic time—like a swarm of locusts. He recalled that a clever woman had once said in his hearing that whenever she felt blas閑 she took up a new language, and at once felt young and eager again. The remark had passed him by at the time, but he recalled it as he devoured and stored away the statutes that in many ways differentiated California from the other States of the Union. The mere fact that his was not the order of brain that took kindly to monotonous application, but inspired him with the more ardent desire to conquer; the sense of being on any sort of a battle-field again gave a color to life. He realized that in six months more of inaction he should have fallen into a constant and morbid habit of self-analysis, and although his soul-sickness could not be healed in a moment, the sense of danger gave an added zest to the impersonal nature of his studies. He subscribed for all the San Francisco newspapers and for those of his own and the adjoining counties. He was not conscious of any mounting love for California, but here his lines were cast, and California was as good a stepping-stone as another. If her politics were hideous he had not made them, and his reviving faith in his star suggested that he may have been born to redeem them. With the polishing up of the rustier parts of his mind even his eyes grew brighter, he moved more quickly, he began to feel all intellect once more, propelled by a body that was daily gaining in red and vigorous blood. Judge Leslie was so delighted with his rapid progress and his exceptionally retentive and classifying memory that he assured everybody he met in Rosewater and St. Peter that he was training a second Alexander Hamilton for the bar of the United States.