I remember a very odd scene that happened at the beginning of it.
Mr. Burton (the other clerk, whose time was to expire the following
year, which was to make a vacancy for me) was a very different man from
Moses Benson. He was respectably connected, and looked down on "the
Jew-boy," but he was hot-tempered, and rather slow-witted, and I think
Moses could manage him; and I think it was he who kept their constant
"tiffs" from coming to real quarrels.
One day, very soon after I began office-life, Benson sent me out to get
him some fancy notepaper, and when I came back I saw the red-haired Mr.
Burton standing by the desk and looking rather more sickly and cross
than usual. I laid down the paper and the change, and asked if Benson
wanted anything else. He thanked me exceedingly kindly, and said, "No,"
and I went out of the enclosure and back to the corner where I had been
cutting out some newspaper extracts for my uncle. At the same time I
drew from under my overcoat which was lying there, an old railway volume
of one of Cooper's novels which Charlie had lent me. I ought not to have
been reading novels in office-hours, but I had had to stop short last
night because my candle went out just at the most exciting point, and I
had had no time to see what became of everybody before I started for
town in the morning.
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