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- devotions. His countenance became intolerably fervid, as he
oratorically assured me—gesticulating with a long ruler at the other
end of the room—that if his services in the morning were useful, how
indispensable, then, in the afternoon?
“With submission, sir,” said Turkey on this occasion, “I consider
myself your right-hand man. In the morning I but marshal and deploy my
columns; but in the afternoon I put myself at their head, and gallantly
charge the foe, thus!”—and he made a violent thrust with the ruler.
“But the blots, Turkey,” intimated I.
“True,—but, with submission, sir, behold these hairs! I am getting old.
Surely, sir, a blot or two of a warm afternoon is not to be severely
urged against gray hairs. Old age—even if it blot the page—is
honorable. With submission, sir, we _both_ are getting old.”
This appeal to my fellow-feeling was hardly to be resisted. At all
events, I saw that go he would not. So I made up my mind to let him
stay, resolving, nevertheless, to see to it, that during the afternoon
he had to do with my less important papers.
Nippers, the second on my list, was a whiskered, sallow, and, upon the
whole, rather piratical-looking young man of about five and twenty. I
always deemed him the victim of two evil powers—ambition and
indigestion. The ambition was evinced by a certain impatience of the
duties of a mere copyist, an unwarrantable usurpation of strictly
professional affairs, such as the original drawing up of legal
documents. The indigestion seemed betokened in an occasional nervous
testiness and grinning irritability, causing the teeth to audibly grind
together over mistakes committed in copying; unnecessary maledictions,
hissed, rather than spoken, in the heat of business; and especially by
a continual discontent with the height of the table where he worked.
Though of a very ingenious mechanical turn, Nippers could never get
this table to suit him. He put chips under it, blocks of various sorts,
bits of pasteboard, and at last went so far as to attempt an exquisite
adjustment by final pieces of folded blotting paper. But no invention
would answer. If, for the sake of easing his back, he brought the table
lid at a sharp angle well up towards his chin, and wrote there like a
man using the steep roof of a Dutch house for his desk:—then he
declared that it stopped the circulation in his arms. If now he lowered
the table to his waistbands, and stooped over it in writing, then there
was a sore aching in his back. In short, the truth of the matter was,
Nippers knew not what he wanted. Or, if he wanted any thing, it was to
be rid of a scrivener’s table altogether. Among the manifestations of
his diseased ambition was a fondness he had for receiving visits from
certain ambiguous-looking fellows in seedy coats, whom he called his
clients. Indeed I was aware that not only was he, at times,
considerable of a ward-politician, but he occasionally did a little
business at the Justices’ courts, and was not unknown on the steps of
the Tombs. I have good reason to believe, however, that one individual
who called upon him at my chambers, and who, with a grand air, he
insisted was his client, was no other than a dun, and the alleged
title-deed, a bill. But with all his failings, and the annoyances he
caused me, Nippers, like his compatriot Turkey, was a very useful man
to me; wrote a neat, swift hand; and, when he chose, was not deficient
in a gentlemanly sort of deportment. Added to this, he always dressed
in a gentlemanly sort of way; and so, incidentally, reflected credit
upon my chambers. Whereas with respect to Turkey, I had much ado to
keep him from being a reproach to me. His clothes were apt to look oily
and smell of eating-houses. He wore his pantaloons very loose and baggy
in summer. His coats were execrable; his hat not to be handled. But
while the hat was a thing of indifference to me, inasmuch as his
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