Village Blackstone

COUNTRY LAWYER--Bellamy Partridge --Whittlesey House ($2.75).

Bellamy Partridge's father never could mend a doorbell or regulate a clock. A can opener was a lifelong mystery to him; he never understood how a fountain pen worked. But he knew law, small boys and small-town folks. Back from the Civil War, he hung out his shingle in the village of Phelps, 30 miles from Rochester, N. Y. There he built up a big law practice, brought up a big covey of young Partridges (five boys, three girls). In this record of a life as quiet as a village street, side-winding nowhere in particular as curvily as a country road, Son Bellamy Partridge mingles filial respect and resigned nostalgia for the pre-filling-station U. S. village.

Most of Lawyer Partridge's practice was concerned with wills and property. But he managed to get as many chuckles out of his neighbors' lawsuits as there were crackers in a cracker barrel. Once after weeks of drought Pastor McLeod urged every villager to join in a community prayer for rain. They did. When a cyclonic thunderstorm blew up shortly, lightning struck the biggest hay barn of irreligious Farmer Dodd, who sued the praying pastor for $5,000 damages. Lawyer Partridge defended the rainmakers, won his case with this defense: prayers had been for rain only, the lightning was "an entirely gratuitous gift" of God.

In Phelps even the town trollop was folksy. Heroine of the best yarn is short, chunky, bespectacled, fast Kate Vandenburg, who had money in the bank, never went to church, never missed a horse race or a ball game. When Kate heard that one precocious young relative had named his brindled bitch "Kate," she cracked: "That's the first member of the family to be named after me." Lawyer Partridge drew up her will. In it Kate left $2,000 in trust for her namesake, the bitch. Remainder she outrageously willed to her "valued friend," ultra-respectable ex-Village President Richman, who had tried to drive her out of town. Spluttering, he refused to be "residuary legatee of a dog."

Bellamy Partridge, who was his father's partner before he took up authoring, writes a plausible brief., to prove that, if life was no pleasanter in the U. S. small town from 1864 to 1914, it was certainly a lot easier to live.

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