one of his school-fellows remembered how, even in the cricket field,
he would stand as though transfixed, looking at the storm clouds,
with their steely edges, coming up behind the copse, but the palms
of his hands were outstretched and he never failed to catch the
ball. 

"Nature intended me for an artist or a poet," Malcolm would say, for
he was given at times to a hard, merciless introspection, when he
took himself and his motives to pieces, "but circumstances have
called me to the bar.  To be sure I have never held a brief, and my
tastes are purely literary, but all the same I am a member of the
legal profession." 

Malcolm Herrick used his Englishman's right of grumbling to a large
extent; with a sort of bitter and acrid humility, he would accuse
himself of having missed his vocation and his rightful heritage, of
being neither "fish, flesh, nor good red herring;" nevertheless his
post for the last two years had pleased him well: he was connected
with a certain large literary society which gave his legal wits
plenty of scope.  In his leisure hours he wrote moderately well-