CHAPTER II

MR. GREWGIOUS’S NEW CLERK

MR. GREWGIOUS, in his solitary chambers in Staple Inn, sipping a cup of coffee after a late dinner, and sipping it in no very enviable frame of mind, has had a trying day. He is feeling deeply that he is getting too old for change, and yet change has been forced upon him — come upon him, as he says to himself, disconsolately, like a clap of thunder from a cloudless sky.

For, however unpleasant it may be, in some points of view, to have a clerk who, intellectually, is immeasurably your superior, and who never hesitates to force the conviction of this fact down your reluctant throat — a bitter tonic for your humility; however inconvenient it may be to have a clerk, so liable to wander into the mazes of fancy and lose himself there as to be never up to the point of poking his own fire, and therefore virtually compelling you to perform that office for him; however harrowing to the feelings it may be, to have a clerk so sunk in melancholy and clogged by the weight of a Tragedy which no one will buy of him, that it is a matter of hard work to hoist him to the surface of everyday life, when he is wanted there; yet all these evils, like all other evils to which mankind is subject, become comparatively easy to bear, from usage.

Not that Mr. Grewgious has had a want of applicants for the post vacated by his late clerk, Bazzard; no, indeed! that would have been a blessing, compared to the dread reality. Ever since he had been so unfortunate as to make his want known in the “Times,” crowds of applicants for the vacant place have been invading the quiet of Staple Inn, and making it as noisy as the noisy streets outside, with the echo of their footsteps. The frightened sparrows, scared from their search for crumbs below, fly dismayed to sheltering roof and chimney, looking down with ruffled feathers, cocked heads, and bright attentive eyes, upon the unwonted scene; and the husky door-bell of Mr. Grewgious’s chambers, breaking down under this unprecedented demand upon its strength, grows dumb and voiceless. Poor Mr. Grewgious himself — clerkless, and only assisted by a temporary boy who is usually absent,