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The clerks meanwhile had a subject for conversation which kept their tongues wagging in an undertone, to the neglect of their work. 'The new lady-clerk! Who would have believed it? And she gave me her card for all the world like a duchess. Here there was a snigger, and one of his fellow-clerks asked how duchesses gave their cards.
Contrary to the usual rule, he did not rebel, but was ignominiously dismissed by his master for dulness and inaptitude; his fellow-clerks pronounced him stupid and incompetent past hope. He was next apprenticed to an engraver, a rough and violent man, who seems to have instantly plunged the boy into a demoralised stupefaction.
"Where does the train stop?" "It will stop at Chester and Crewe." "Then give me a ticket for Crewe," she said, and, with a smile on his face, the clerk complied. She took the ticket and he gave her the change. She swept it into her purse with an absent, preoccupied manner, and he turned with a smile to one of his fellow-clerks, touching his forehead significantly.
For two years he had always come to the office with the same old patched umbrella, to the great amusement of his fellow-clerks. At last he got tired of their jokes, and insisted upon his wife buying him a new one. She bought one for eight francs and a half, one of those cheap articles which large houses sell as an advertisement.
"Death hath moulded into calm completeness The statue of their life." Charles Frederick Mackenzie was born in 1825 of an old Scottish Tory family, members from the first of the Scottish Church in the days of her persecution. His father, Colin Mackenzie, was one of Walter Scott's fellow-Clerks of Session, and is commemorated by one of the Introductions to "Marmion," as
Now I don't care so much; that is the difference. Then I cared a great deal, but I kept on at my hated task. What else was there for me to do? My salary was so small that, as Charlie Burns, one of my fellow-clerks, said of his, I was afraid to count it over a bare floor for fear that it might drop in a crack and be lost. It was my only revenue, however, and I continued to live upon it somehow.
He took pleasure in helping his mother and sisters, but did not take greater pleasure in thinking that to do this kindness to them he must be contented for a time to dress a little worse than his fellow-clerks; his clothes might appear a little worn, but they were like the spot on the dress of a soldier arising from the discharge of duty; they were no marks of undue carelessness; necessity had wrought them; and while they indicated necessity, they marked also the path of honour, and without such spots duty must have been neglected.
I had an affection for them, these fellow-clerks, and I often wondered at their contentment with the drab lives they led, at their self-congratulation for "having a job" at Breck and Company's. "You don't mean to say you like this kind of work?" I exclaimed one day to Johnny Hedges, as we sat on barrels of XXXX flour looking out at the hot sunlight in the alley.
And yet I could hardly bring myself to dislike my fellow-clerks, who, all of them, as far as I had found out, were good- natured, and certainly very entertaining, and who, when they perceived that I was amused by their proceedings, relaxed a good deal in their attitude to me.
The young ass called his wife Annie, and was evidently on very familiar terms with her. It was more than he could bear. When she came home they had a scene. She reproached him with the fact that he did not take his views on the emancipation of women seriously, otherwise he could not be annoyed at her being on familiar terms with her fellow-clerks.
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