Or, once more, you may be one of the thousand clerks of a great
manufacturer, and be humbly related to one of the arts or crafts that
gladden the eye or add to the comforts of man. Or even, though you may
be denied so close an association with the elements, or the arts, you
may be the pen to some subtle legal confidante of human nature. Your
office may be stored with records of human perversity and whimsicality.
You may be the witness to fantastic wills, or assist in the
administration of the estates of lunatics. At all events, you will come
within hearing of the human passions. Misers will visit you at times,
and beautiful ladies in mourning deep as their distress; and from your
desk you will catch a glimpse of the sombre pageantry of litigious man.
Though it is true that a certain far-off flavour of these legal
excitements occasionally enlivened the business to which Henry had been
sacrificially indentured, for the most part it was an abstract
parasitical thing which had succeeded in persuading other businesses,
more directly fed from the human spring, of its obliging usefulness in
relieving them of detachable burdens.
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