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- afford to sport such a lustrous face and a lustrous coat at one and the
same time. As Nippers once observed, Turkey’s money went chiefly for
red ink. One winter day, I presented Turkey with a highly
respectable-looking coat of my own—a padded gray coat, of a most
comfortable warmth, and which buttoned straight up from the knee to the
neck. I thought Turkey would appreciate the favor, and abate his
rashness and obstreperousness of afternoons. But no; I verily believe
that buttoning himself up in so downy and blanket-like a coat had a
pernicious effect upon him—upon the same principle that too much oats
are bad for horses. In fact, precisely as a rash, restive horse is said
to feel his oats, so Turkey felt his coat. It made him insolent. He was
a man whom prosperity harmed.
Though, concerning the self-indulgent habits of Turkey, I had my own
private surmises, yet, touching Nippers, I was well persuaded that,
whatever might be his faults in other respects, he was, at least, a
temperate young man. But, indeed, nature herself seemed to have been
his vintner, and, at his birth, charged him so thoroughly with an
irritable, brandy-like disposition, that all subsequent potations were
needless. When I consider how, amid the stillness of my chambers,
Nippers would sometimes impatiently rise from his seat, and stooping
over his table, spread his arms wide apart, seize the whole desk, and
move it, and jerk it, with a grim, grinding motion on the floor, as if
the table were a perverse voluntary agent, intent on thwarting and
vexing him, I plainly perceive that, for Nippers, brandy-and-water were
altogether superfluous.
It was fortunate for me that, owing to its peculiar
cause—indigestion—the irritability and consequent nervousness of
Nippers were mainly observable in the morning, while in the afternoon
he was comparatively mild. So that, Turkey’s paroxysms only coming on
about twelve o’clock, I never had to do with their eccentricities at
one time. Their fits relieved each other, like guards. When Nippers’s
was on, Turkey’s was off; and _vice versa_. This was a good natural
arrangement, under the circumstances.
Ginger Nut, the third on my list, was a lad, some twelve years old.
His, father was a carman, ambitious of seeing his son on the bench
instead of a cart, before he died. So he sent him to my office, as
student at law, errand-boy, cleaner and sweeper, at the rate of one
dollar a week. He had a little desk to himself, but he did not use it
much. Upon inspection, the drawer exhibited a great array of the shells
of various sorts of nuts. Indeed, to this quick-witted youth, the whole
noble science of the law was contained in a nut-shell. Not the least
among the employments of Ginger Nut, as well as one which he discharged
with the most alacrity, was his duty as cake and apple purveyor for
Turkey and Nippers. Copying law-papers being proverbially a dry, husky
sort of business, my two scriveners were fain to moisten their mouths
very often with Spitzenbergs, to be had at the numerous stalls nigh the
Custom House and Post Office. Also, they sent Ginger Nut very
frequently for that peculiar cake—small, flat, round, and very
spicy—after which he had been named by them. Of a cold morning, when
business was but dull, Turkey would gobble up scores of these cakes, as
if they were mere wafers—indeed, they sell them at the rate of six or
eight for a penny—the scrape of his pen blending with the crunching of
the crisp particles in his mouth. Of all the fiery afternoon blunders
and flurried rashnesses of Turkey, was his once moistening a
ginger-cake between his lips, and clapping it on to a mortgage, for a
seal. I came within an ace of dismissing him then. But he mollified me
by making an oriental bow, and saying—
“With submission, sir, it was generous of me to find you in stationery
on my own account.”
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