An excerpt from the book -
A person who is ignorant of legal matters is always liable to make
mistakes when he tries to photograph a court scene with his pen; and so I
was not willing to let the law chapters in this book go to press without
first subjecting them to rigid and exhausting revision and correction by
a trained barrister--if that is what they are called. These chapters are
right, now, in every detail, for they were rewritten under the immediate
eye of William Hicks, who studied law part of a while in southwest
Missouri thirty-five years ago and then came over here to Florence for
his health and is still helping for exercise and board in Macaroni
Vermicelli's horse-feed shed, which is up the back alley as you turn
around the corner out of the Piazza del Duomo just beyond the house where
that stone that Dante used to sit on six hundred years ago is let into
the wall when he let on to be watching them build Giotto's campanile and
yet always got tired looking as Beatrice passed along on her way to get a
chunk of chestnut cake to defend herself with in case of a Ghibelline
outbreak before she got to school, at the same old stand where they sell
the same old cake to this day and it is just as light and good as it was
then, too, and this is not flattery, far from it.
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