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Life was terribly earnest to young Holcombe, and he regarded it from the point of view of one who looks down upon it from the judge’s bench, and listens with a frown to those who plead its cause. He was not fooled by it; he was alive to its wickedness and its evasions. He would tell you that he knew for a fact that the window man in his district was a cousin of the Tammany candidate, and that the contractor who had the cleaning of the street to do was a brother-in-law of one of the Hall’s sachems, and that the policeman on his beat had not been in the country eight months. He spoke of these damning facts with the air of one who simply tells you that much, that you should see how terrible the whole thing really was, and what he could tell if he wished.

In his own profession he recognized the trials of law-breakers only as experiments which went to establish and explain a general principle. And prisoners were not men to him, but merely the exceptions that proved the excellence of a rule. Holcombe would defend the lowest creature or the most outrageous of murderers, not because the man was a human being fighting for his liberty or life, but because he wished to see if certain evidence would be admitted in the trial of such a case. Of one of his clients the judge, who had a daughter of his own, said, when he sentenced him, “Were there many more such men as you in the world, the women of this land would pray to God to be left childless.” And when some one asked Holcombe, with ill-concealed disgust, how he came to defend the man, he replied: “I wished to show the unreliability of expert testimony from medical men. Yes; they tell me the man was a very bad lot.”

It was measures, not men, to Holcombe, and law and order were his twin goddesses, and “no compromise” his watchword.

“You can elect your man if you’ll give me two thousand dollars to refit our club-room with,” one of his political acquaintances once said to him. “We’ve five hundred voters on the rolls now, and the members vote as one man. You’d be saving the city twenty times that much if you keep Croker’s man out of the job. You know that as well as I do.”

“The city can better afford to lose twenty thousand dollars,” Holcombe answered, “than we can afford to give a two-cent stamp for corruption.”

“All right,” said the heeler; “all right, Mr. Holcombe. Go on. Fight ’em your own way. If they’d agree to fight you with pamphlets and circulars you’d stand a chance, sir; but as long as they give out money and you give out reading-matter to people that can’t read, they’ll win, and I naturally want to be on the winning side.”

When the club to which Holcombe belonged finally succeeded in getting the Police Commissioners indicted for blackmailing gambling-houses, Holcombe was, as a matter of course and of public congratulation, on the side of the law; and as Assistant District Attorney–a position given him on account of his father’s name and in the hope that it would shut his mouth–distinguished himself nobly.

Of the four commissioners, three were convicted–the fourth, Patrick Meakim, with admirable foresight having fled to that country from which few criminals return, and which is vaguely set forth in the newspapers as “parts unknown.”

The trial had been a severe one upon the zealous Mr. Holcombe, who found himself at the end of it in a very bad way, with nerves unstrung and brain so fagged that he assented without question when his doctor exiled him from New York by ordering a sea voyage, with change of environment and rest at the other end of it. Some one else suggested the northern coast of Africa and Tangier, and Holcombe wrote minute directions to the secretaries of all of his reform clubs urging continued efforts on the part of his fellow-workers, and sailed away one cold winter’s morning for Gibraltar. The great sea laid its hold upon him, and the winds from the south thawed the cold in his bones, and the sun cheered his tired spirit. He stretched himself at full length reading those books which one puts off reading until illness gives one the right to do so, and so far as in him lay obeyed his doctor’s first command, that he should forget New York and all that pertained to it. By the time he had reached the Rock he was up and ready to drift farther into the lazy, irresponsible life of the Mediterranean coast, and he had forgotten his struggles against municipal misrule, and was at times for hours together utterly oblivious of his own personality.