The Third Volume by Fergus Hume

ONCE upon a time popular imagination pictured a lawyer as a cadaverous creature, arrayed in rusty black, with bulging blue-bag, and dry forensic lore on his tongue. So was the child of Themis represented in endless Adelphia farces; and his moral nature, as conceived by the ingenious playwright, was even less inviting than his exterior. He was a scamp, a rogue, a compiler of interminable bills, an exactor of the last shilling, a legal _Shylock_, hard-fisted and avaricious. To a great extent this type is a thing of the past, for your latter-day lawyer is an alert, well-dressed personage, social and amiable. Still he is looked on with awe as a dispenser of justice, -- very often of injustice, -- and not all the fine raiment in the world can rob him of his ancient reputation: when he was a dread being to the dwellers of Grub Street, who mostly had the task of limning his portrait, and so impartial revenge pictured him as above.

All of which preamble leads up to the fact that Francis Hilliston was a lawyer of the new school, despite his sixty and more years. In appearance he was not unlike a farmer, and indeed owned a few arable acres in Kent, where he played the role of a modern Cincinnatus. There he affected rough clothing and an interest in agricultural subjects, but in town in his Lincoln's Inn Fields' office he was solemnly arrayed in a frock coat with other garments to match, and conveyed into his twinkling eyes an expression of dignified learning. He was a different man in London to what he was in Kent, and was a kind of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for moral transformations. On this special occasion frock-coated legality was uppermost.