The members of the junior bar chatted with the representatives of the lower branch of the profession who ranged from articled clerks whose young souls had not been entirely dried up by association with parchment, to hard old delvers in dusty documents who had lived so long in the legal atmosphere of quibbling, obstruction, and deceit, that they were as incapable of an honest impetuous act as of an illegal one.

This hits the mark exactly, and makes us tremble at the prophetic power of some of those old delvers in the mines of dark prediction.

He was a smith, an artificer, and a delver in mines from the beginning.

I wonder what Mrs. Grundy would say, could her Argus-eyes penetrate to the spot, where we,bound to "die of roses in aromatic pain,"in miners'-garb, masculine and muddy, sit on stones with earthy delvers, more than six hundred feet under ground,where the foot of woman has never trod before, nor the voice of woman echoed,and sip, with the relish of intense thirst, steaming black tea from an old tin cup!

Never man rejoiced More than Geraint to greet her thus attired; And glancing all at once as keenly at her As careful robins eye the delver's toil, Made her cheek burn and either eyelid fall, But rested with her sweet face satisfied; Then seeing cloud upon the mother's brow, Her by both hands he caught, and sweetly said, "O my new mother, be not wroth or grieved At thy new son, for my petition to her.

" With that he turn'd and look'd as keenly at her As careful robins eye the delver's toil; And that within her, which a wanton fool, Or hasty judger would have call'd her guilt, Made her cheek burn and either eyelid fall.

His dinner, roast meat, with a loaf that filled A Dorian basket, you might soothly say Had satisfied a delver; and to close The day he took, sans fire, a scanty meal.

o'er fallows thrice upturn'd Or four times by the share; the bounds whereof Well do the delvers know, whose busy feet Troop to his wine-vats in fair summer-time.

That will account for this restless delver's extraordinary talismanic renown.

These were filled for me by expert hands with whatever I might require for my task, and a screen shut off my corner from the corridor through which at times perambulated Roosevelt, and other secluded delvers, intent on early Gaelic literature and what not.