s drenched with it, the crumbling bricks, the negro hovels, the few
sickly ailantus trees, exuded the sharp scent, and even the wind brought
stray wafts, as from a giant's pipe, when it blew in gusts up from the
river-bottom. Overhead the sky appeared to hang flat and low as if seen
through a thin brown veil, and the ancient warehouses, sloping toward
the river, rose like sombre prisons out of the murky air. It was still
before the introduction of modern machinery into the factories, and as I
approached the rotting wooden steps which led into the largest building,
loose leaves of tobacco, scattered in the unloading, rustled with a
sharp, crackling noise under my feet.

Inside, a clerk on a high stool, with a massive ledger before him,
looked up at my entrance, and stuck his pen behind his ear with a sigh
of relief.

"A gentleman told me you might want a boy, sir," I began.

He got down from his stool, and sauntering across the room, took a long
drink from a bucket of water that stood by the door.

"What gentleman?" he enquired, as he flirted a few drops on the steps
outside, and returned the tin dipper to the rusty nail over the bucket.

I drew out the card, which I had kept carefully wrapped in a piece of
brown paper in my trousers' pocket. When I handed it to him, he looked
at it with a low whistle and stood twirling it in his fingers.

"The gentleman owns about nine-tenths of the business," he remarked for
my information. Then turning his head he called over his shoulder to
some one hidden behind the massive ledgers on the desk. "I say, Bob,
here's a boy the General's sent along. What'll you do with him?"

Bob, a big, blowzy man, who appeared to be upon terms of intimacy with
every clerk in the office, came leisurely out into the room, and looked
me over with what I felt to be a shrewd and yet not unkindly glance.
"It's the second he's sent down in two weeks," he observed, "but this
one seems sprightly enough. What's your name, boy?"

"Ben Starr."

"Well, Ben, what're you good for?"

"'Most anything, sir."

"'Most anything, eh? Well, come along, and I'll put you at 'most
anything."

He spoke in a pleasant, jovial tone, which made me adore him on the
spot; and as he led me across a dark hall and up a sagging flight of
steps, he enquired good-humouredly how I had met General Bolingbroke and
why he had given me his card.

"He's a great man, is the General!" he exclaimed with enthusiasm. "When
you met him