pense.

"Bai-ey Je-ove!" he said the very next Sunday when I met him outside the
church after service. "You aah one of aws, now, Lorton, hay?"

"Yes," I said.

"Aw then, my de-ah fellah, you mustn't chawff me any mo-ah, you know.
_Dawg don't eat dawg_, you know--ah, hay, Lorton!"

And he chuckled considerably at his feeble wit.

Poor Horner!

CHAPTER FIVE.

"LOVE LIES BLEEDING."

What is my guilt that makes me so with thee?
Have I not languished prostrate at thy feet?
Have I not lived whole days upon thy sight?
Have I not seen thee where thou hast not been;
And, mad with the idea, clasp'd the wind,
And doated upon nothing?

Although Mr Mawley had expressed such a disparaging opinion anent my
capabilities for official work, I do not think I made such an
inefficient clerk on the whole.

I did not mulct my country of any portion of the hours appointed for my
labour, pleading Charles Lamb's humorous excuse, that, if I _did_ come
late, I certainly made up for it "by going away early!" On the
contrary, my attendance was so uniformly regular, that it attracted the
notice of the chief of my room, getting me a word of commendation.

Praise from such a quarter was praise indeed, as the individual in
question was one of the old order of clerks, stiff, prosaic and crabbed
to a degree--who looked upon all the new race of young men that now
entered the service as so many sons of Belial. "Their ways" were not
"his ways;" and, their free and easy manners, and absence of all that
wholesome awe of chiefs which had been customary in his day, proved,
beyond doubt, that official life in general, and that of _his_
department in particular, was decidedly "going to the devil!"

He lived in the office, I verily believe; coming there at some unearthly
hour in the morning, and leaving long after every one else had sought
their homes.

The messengers had been interrogated on the subject of his arrival, but
they protested that they always found him installed at his usual desk,
no matter how early they might set about clearing out the room in
anticipation of the ordinary routine of the day; while, as for the time
of his departure, nobody could give any reliable information respecting
that!

The hall-porter, who remained in charge of the establishment when
business was over, might, perhaps, have afforded us some data on which
we could have decided the mooted point, but he was a moody, taciturn
personage, who ha