Читать книгу Reminiscences of a Raconteur, Between the '40s and the '20s - George H. Ham - Страница 6

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The law was proposed to be my profession—after graduating from Toronto University—but as there were very few who were learned in legal lore and had achieved high distinction and greatly accumulated wealth in the immediate vicinity, I baulked, and went into newspaper-work in the old Chronicle office at Whitby.

One reason for this was my previous experience. When I was a mere kid and visiting grandfather’s old home at South Fredericksburg, opposite the upper gap of the Bay of Quinte, that venerable ancestor of mine confided in me that he wished to make his will without the knowledge of the rest of the family and suggested that I should draw up the document. In school-boy hand the will was drawn up, and while it suited grandfather all right enough, I wasn’t so cocksure it was in the right form and phraseology. So I commandeered a horse the next day and stole off to Napanee, eighteen miles away, and called upon Mr. Wilkinson, afterwards Judge Wilkinson, whom I had met at my father’s house in Whitby. He pronounced the will to be perfectly legal, and, having all of $2.00 in my pocket, I rather ostentatiously asked him his fee.

“Nothing, he smilingly replied. “Nothing at all—we never charge the profession anything—never.”

And thus I was able to get an elaborate twenty-five cent dinner at the hotel. So when the question of my future came up, I thought if it was so blamed easy to be a lawyer, I wanted something harder.