w, a sportsman and
renowned at cricket, and she was amiable and pretty, a little blonde
beauty. The parents were well to do, and in due time forgave the
imprudent match. At this we all rejoiced for he was a general favourite.

Looking back now it seems to me the office staff was in some ways a
curious collection and very different to the clerks of to-day. Many of
them had not entered railway life until nearly middle-age and they had
not assimilated as an office staff does now, when all join as youths and
are brought up together. They were original, individual, not to say
eccentric. Whilst our office included certain steady married clerks, who
worked hard and lived ordinary middle-class respectable lives, and some
few bachelors of quiet habit, the rest were a lively set indeed, by no
means free from inclinations to coarse conviviality and many of them
spendthrift, reckless and devil-may-care. At pay-day, which occurred
monthly, most of these merry wights, after receiving their pay, betook
themselves to the _Midland Tap_ or other licensed house and there
indulged, for the remainder of the afternoon, in abundant beer, pouring
down glass after glass; in Charles Lamb's inimitable words: "the second
to see where the first has gone, the third to see no harm happens to the
second, a fourth to say there is another coming, and a fifth to say he is
not sure he is the last." Some of the merriest of them would not return
to the office that day but extend their carouse far into the night; to
sadly realise next day that it was "the morning after the night before."

I do not think our ladylike chief clerk ever indulged in these orgies,
but I never knew more than the mildest remonstrance being made by him or
by anyone in authority.

Pay-day was also the time for squaring accounts. "The human species,"
Charles Lamb says, "is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow
and the men who lend." This was true of our office, but no equal
division prevailed as the borrowers predominated and the lenders, the
prudent, were a small minority. A general settlement took place monthly,
after which a new period began--by the borrowers with joyous unconcern.
"Take no thought for the morrow" was a maxim dear to the heart of these
knights of the pen.

Swearing, as I have said, was not considered low or vulgar or unbecoming
a gentleman. There was a senior clerk of some standing and position, a
married man of thirty-five or forty years