About half-way between end and end of Nassau street stands a row of what were modest dwelling-houses in the remote days when the city was under the rule of the Americans, but are now only so many floors of law offices. Who owns them is not known; for proprietors of real-estate in this extraordinary highway of antiquity are never mentioned in public like owners in any other street; but they are shabby, dreary, hopeless-looking old piles, suggestive of having, perhaps, been hurried and tumbled through musty law-suits scores of times, and occupied at last by the robber Law itself for costs. On a certain dark, foggy afternoon in December, one of the seediest of the fallen brick brotherhood presented a particularly dingy appearance, as the gas-lights necessitated by the premature gloom of the hour gleamed dimly through a blearing window-pane here and there. The house still retained the narrow street-door, hall-way, and abrupt immediate stairway of its earlier days; and had, too, the old-style goodly single brown stone for a "stoop," along the front fall of which, in faded white block letters, as though originally done with a stencil-plate, appeared the strange device:
Whether this curious legend referred to the sweets or bitters of the tenement's various experiences; whether it meant Subjected To 1860 'Xecutions, or Sacrificed to 1860 'Xecutors, or Sentenced to Wait e'en Sixty 'Xigencies, did not bother the head of Mr. DIBBLE, who came in from Gowanus every morning to occupy his law-office up-stairs, and was sitting thoughtfully therein, before a grate fire, on the dull, wintry afternoon in question.
Severely unostentatious was that office, with its two ink-stained desks, shelves of lettered deed-boxes, glass case of law-books in sheep, and vellum-covered reading-table in the centre of the room. Its prompt lesson for the visitor was: You are now in the Office of an old-school Constitutional Lawyer, Sir; and if you want an Absolute Divorce, Obtained for No Cause, in Any State; No Publicity; No Charges; you must step around to a certain newspaper sanctum for your witnesses, and apply to some other legal practitioner. In this establishment, sir, after you have left your measure in the shape of a retaining fee, we fit you with a suit warranted to last as long as you do. We cut your pockets to suit ourselves, but furnish you as much choler as you can stand. If you are a pursey man the suit will have no lack of sighs for you; if you are thin, it will make your waste the greater.