(No. 3.)

December 10.—I have put in a long and exhausting day in the court to-day in the case of Merkins vs. Merkins, a suit for divorce in which I am the counsel for the plaintiff, Eliza J. Merkins.

The case itself is a peculiarly trying one, and the plaintiff adds to its horrors by consulting me when I want to do something else. I took her case at an agreed price, and so Mrs. Merkins is trying to get her money's worth by consulting me in a way I abhor. She has consulted me in every mood and tense that I know of; at my office, on the street, in church, at the festive board and at different funerals to which we both happened to be called. Mrs. Merkins has hung like a pall over several Massachusetts funerals which otherwise had every symptom of success.

I am a great admirer of woman as a woman, but as a client in a suit for divorce she has her peculiarities. I have seen Eliza in every phase of the case. She has been calm and tearful, stormy and snorting, low-spirited and red-nosed, violent and menacing, resigned but sobby, trustful and confidential, high strung and haughty, crushed and weepy.

She makes a specialty of shedding the red-hot scalding tear wherever she can obtain permission to do so. She has wept in my wood-box, in my new spittoon, on my desk and on my birthday. I told her that I wished she would please weep on something else. There were enough objects in nature upon which a poor woman who wept constantly and had no other visible means of support could shed the wild torrents of her grief, without weeping on my anniversary. A man wants to keep his birthday as dry as possible. He hates to have it wept on by a client who has jewed him down to half price, and then insisted on coming in to sob with him in the morning before he has swept the office floor.

One time she came and sobbed on my shoulder. Her tears are of the warm, damp kind, and feel disagreeable as they roll down the neck of a comparative stranger, who never can be aught but a friend. She rested her bonnet on my bosom while she wept, and I then discovered that she has been in the habit of wearing this bonnet while cooking her buckwheat pancakes. I presume she keeps her bonnet on all the time, so that she may be ready to dash out and consult me at all times without delay. Still, she ought not to do it, for when she leans her head on the bosom of her counsel in order to consult him, he detects the odor of the early sausage and the fleeting pancake.

As soon as I saw that her object was to lean up against me and not only convulse herself with sobs, but that she intended to jar me also with her great woe, I told her that I would have to request her to avaunt. I then, as she did not act upon my suggestion, avaunted her myself. I avaunted her into a chair with a sickening thud.

{Illustration: A TENDER CASE.}