The Scarlet Letters Read Online Free

lectured through an amplifier, who had devoted his life to the study and teaching of contract law, with rare but well-paid appearances in court as an expert witness to edify the bench. He was supposed to have thus answered a judge's question as to who was the foremost authority in his field: "I believe, your honor, that Mr. Williston at Harvard is generally deemed the second." Unlike many law professors he disdained the barking approach; he was invariably kind and courteous to his students, and was notorious, when questioning one of them in class, for offering broad hints as to the correct answer. He wanted to believe that every man or woman seated before him was a natural lawyer, but he nonetheless had a keen eye for a real talent, and when he found a paper of Ambrose's on unilateral contracts unusually perspicacious, he called him into his office and offered him on the spot a job assisting him in revising an edition of his famous casebook. It was, of course, quite a load to take on in addition to Ambrose's class work, but as the stipend was generous, thanks to Gregg's soft heart, and as the Vollard allowance, from a still doubting father, was still on the stingy side, he jumped at the chance.
    The close relationship that ensued between master and apprentice gave Ambrose his first real purpose and incentive in life. He came to see his wonderful little mentor as an inspired artist who could use words as his tools to clamp the golden wires of civility around the dark chaos of life. Offer and acceptance, good faith and bad, the meeting or non-meeting of minds, consideration and specific performance, breach and damages—the areas of contractual obligation opened up to him like a massive clearing in a dense dark threatening jungle, and the beauty of Gideon Gregg's prose in the essay portions of his casebook, the tight flashing mesh of his Anglo-Saxon short words and his Latinized long ones, seamlessly concise and pregnant with meaning, provided Ambrose with a kind of creed, or art, or even faith that might be almost enough to live on.
    By the middle of his second year at law school Ambrose had completed his work on the casebook, which was just as well, as he had accepted, at the professor's strong urging, an editorship on the Law Journal that would henceforth preempt his every spare moment.
    "Whatever else happens to me in life, sir," he told his mentor, "I know now that I will always be a lawyer."
    Gregg stared at him in astonishment. "Great Scott, my boy, was there ever a doubt in your mind about that? What the devil else did you come to law school for?"
    "Oh, I heard it was a good preparation for almost everything."
    "It's a good preparation for the practice of law, that's what it is. And if ever I saw a born attorney, it's you, my boy. If you do anything else, you're a fool, and if you're that it's time I retired. For if I'm wrong on that, I'm wrong on everything."
    "But is it necessary to practice, sir? Couldn't I be a teacher like you and the writer of treatises?"
    Gregg was silent for a moment, and his face expressed the seriousness of his thought. "You could, yes. But I think your particular forte will be for an active practice. I see you as a fighter, my boy. Nor do I for a minute minimize that. The judge, the law professor, the treatise writer and the practicing lawyer are all equally indispensable to our sacred profession. The law comes out of our words: words penned for books and treatises in sober reflection, words used less temperately in briefs and oral argument, words chosen wisely in opinions or dramatically in classrooms, it's all the same game!"
    Ambrose had another talk with the professor about his future a year later, in the spring before his graduation.
    "Am I not correct, Ambrose, in supposing that Charles de Peyster is a relative of yours?"
    "He's my uncle, sir. My mother's brother."
    "May I suggest, then, that you apply to his firm for a position? It's one of the first, perhaps the best, of the great