The Confessions of Artemas Quibble

Confessions of Artemas Quibble,
by Arthur Train

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Title: The Confessions of Artemas Quibble
Author: Arthur Train
Release Date: January 26, 2007 [EBook #20451]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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CONFESSIONS OF ARTEMAS QUIBBLE ***

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Transcriber's note:
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Typographical errors have been corrected; 19th-century spellings have
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THE CONFESSIONS OF ARTEMAS QUIBBLE
BEING THE INGENUOUS AND UNVARNISHED HISTORY OF
ARTEMAS QUIBBLE, ESQUIRE, ONE-TIME PRACTITIONER IN
THE NEW YORK CRIMINAL COURTS, TOGETHER WITH AN
ACCOUNT OF THE DIVERS WILES, TRICKS, SOPHISTRIES,
TECHNICALITIES, AND SUNDRY ARTIFICES OF HIMSELF
AND OTHERS OF THE FRATERNITY, COMMONLY YCLEPT
"SHYSTERS" OR "SHYSTER LAWYERS," AS EDITED BY
ARTHUR TRAIN FORMERLY ASSISTANT DISTRICT
ATTORNEY NEW YORK COUNTY
ILLUSTRATED
NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1922
COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
PRINTED AT THE SCRIBNER PRESS NEW YORK, U.S.A.
ILLUSTRATIONS [omitted]
THE CONFESSIONS OF ARTEMAS QUIBBLE
CHAPTER I
I was born in the town in Lynn, Massachusetts, upon the twenty-
second day of February, in the year 1855. Unlike most writers of
similar memoirs, I shall cast no aspersions upon the indigent by stating
that my parents were poor but honest. They were poor and honest, as
indeed, so far as I have been able to ascertain, have been all the

Quibbles since the founder of the family came over on the good ship
Susan and Ellen in 1635, and, after marrying a lady's maid who had
been his fellow passenger, settled in the township of Weston, built a
mill, and divided his time equally between selling rum to the Indians
and rearing a numerous progeny.
My father, the Reverend Ezra Quibble, was, to be sure, poor enough.
The salary that he received as pastor of his church was meagre to the
degree of necessitating my wearing his over-worn and discarded
clerical vestments, which to some extent may account for my otherwise
inexplicable distaste for things ecclesiastical. My mother was poor,
after wedlock, owing to the eccentricity of a parent who was so
inexorably opposed to religion that he cut her off with a shilling upon
her marriage to my father. Before this she had had and done what she
chose, as was fitting for a daughter of a substantial citizen who had
made a fortune in shoe leather.
I remember that one of my first experiments upon taking up the study
of law was to investigate by grandfather's will in the probate office,
with a view to determining whether or not, in his fury against the
church, he had violated any of the canons of the law in regard to
perpetuities or restraints upon alienation; or whether in his enthusiasm
for the Society for the Propagation of Free Thinking, which he had
established and intended to perpetuate, he had not been guilty of some
technical slip or blunder that would enable me to seize upon its
endowment for my own benefit. But the will, alas! had been drawn by
that most careful of draughtsmen, old Tuckerman Toddleham, of 14
Barristers' Hall, Boston, and was as solid as the granite blocks of the
court-house and as impregnable of legal attack as the Constitution.
We lived in a frame house, painted a disconsolate yellow. It abutted
close upon the sidewalk and permitted the passer-by to view the family
as we sat at meat or enjoyed the moderate delights of social intercourse
with our neighbors, most of whom were likewise parishioners of my
father.
My early instruction was received in the public schools of my native
town, supplemented by tortured hours at home with "Greenleaf's

Mental Arithmetic" and an exhaustive study of the major and minor
prophets. The former stood me in good stead, but the latter I fear had
small effect. At any rate, the impression made upon me bore little fruit,
and after three years of them I found myself in about the same frame of
mind as the Oxford student who, on being asked at his examination to
distinguish between the major and minor prophets, wrote in answer:
"God forbid that I should discriminate between such holy men!"
But for all that I was naturally of a studious and even scholarly
disposition, and much preferred browsing among the miscellaneous
books piled in a corner of the attic to playing the