The Lawyers of Dickens-Land a particularly angular clerk I have the good fortune to possess, whose father, being a Norfolk farmer, sends him up (the turkey up), as a present to me, from the neighborhood of Norwich. I should be quite proud of your wishing to see me, my dear. As a professional Re ceiver of Rents, so very few people do wish to see me, that the novelty would be bracing." He had his set of chambers in Staple Inn, Holborn, in a corner house in a little inner quadrangle, presenting in black and white over its ugly portal the mysterious inscription, P J T 1747 In this set of chambers he lived his lonely existence with Bazzard, his clerk, never having troubled his head about the inscription, "unless to bethink him self at odd times on glancing up at it, that haply it might mean Perhaps John Thomas, or Perhaps Joe Tyler," — or when making a requisition on the wine cellar below the common stair, "if P. J. T. drank such wines, then for a certainty, P. J. T. was Pretty Jolly Too." He had laid himself out in the begin ning for "chamber practice"; to draw deeds — "convey the wise it call," as Pistol says. But conveyancing and he had made such a very indifferent mar riage of it that they had separated by consent. Coy conveyancing would not come to Mr. Grewgious. But an Arbi tration being blown towards him by some unaccountable wind, and he gain ing great credit in it as one indefatigable in seeking out right and doing right, a pretty fat Receivership was next blown into his pocket by a wind more trace able to its source. So, by chance, he had found his niche. Receiver and
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Agent now to two rich estates, and deputing their legal business, in an amount worth having, to a firm of solicitors on the floor below, he had snuffed out his ambition (supposing him to have ever lighted it) and had settled down with his snuffers for the rest of his life under the dry vine and figtree of P. J. T., who planted in seventeen-forty-seven . There was no luxury in his room. Even its comforts were limited to its being dry and warm and having a snug though faded fireside. What might be called its private life was confined to the hearth, and an easy-chair, and an old-fashioned occasional round table that was brought out upon the rug after business hours from a corner where it elsewhere remained turned up like a shining mahogany shield. Behind it, when standing thus on the defensive, was a closet usually containing some thing good to drink. An outer room was the clerk's room. Mr. Grewgious' sleep ing apartment was across the stair, and he held some not empty cellarage at the bottom of the common stairs. Three hundred days in the year at least, he crossed over to the hotel in Furnival's Inn for his dinner, and after dinner crossed back again, to make the most of these simplicities until it should be come broad business day once more, with P. J. T., seventeen forty-seven. Accounts and account-books, files of correspondence and strong boxes gar nished his room in conscientiously pre cise and orderly arrangement. The ap prehension of dying suddenly and leav ing one fact or one figure with any in completeness or obscurity attaching to it, would have stretched Mr. Grewgious stone dead any day. The largest fidel ity to a trust was the life-blood of the man. And as Dickens says, "there are sorts of life-blood that course more
