Yankee lawyer: The autobiography of Ephraim Tutt

"Ephraim Tutt needs no introduction to the general public. I cannot, however, with any grace refuse his request to contribute a brief foreword to these reminiscences undertaken largely because of my own importunity. Indeed, I have for so many years played the part of Boswell to his Johnson, and availed myself so freely of the material with which he has supplied me for fictional purposes, that natural gratitude, if nothing else, requires my acquiescence. Mr. Tutt, if left to himself, would have been the last person in the world to assume that anyone could possibly be interested in the facts of his private life, and, when I asserted the contrary, he protested that, as Sir John Selden said of equity, and autobiography is "a roguish thing" which almost unfailingly lowers its author in the public esteem. Too many old fools, he declared, had already filled thousands of printed pages with complaisant accounts of their ancestry and babyhood, followed by vapid glorification of their own supposed achievements, which had made their old age a laughing stock instead of a tranquil prelude to a deserved oblivion." (from introduction by Arthur Train, New York, July, 1943)