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- 2026-01-30T07:57:55.409Z
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- 2121
- text
- profoundly sleeping. Something prompted me to touch him. I felt his
hand, when a tingling shiver ran up my arm and down my spine to my
feet.
The round face of the grub-man peered upon me now. “His dinner is
ready. Won’t he dine to-day, either? Or does he live without dining?”
“Lives without dining,” said I, and closed the eyes.
“Eh!—He’s asleep, ain’t he?”
“With kings and counselors,” murmured I.
There would seem little need for proceeding further in this history.
Imagination will readily supply the meagre recital of poor Bartleby’s
interment. But, ere parting with the reader, let me say, that if this
little narrative has sufficiently interested him, to awaken curiosity
as to who Bartleby was, and what manner of life he led prior to the
present narrator’s making his acquaintance, I can only reply, that in
such curiosity I fully share, but am wholly unable to gratify it. Yet
here I hardly know whether I should divulge one little item of rumor,
which came to my ear a few months after the scrivener’s decease. Upon
what basis it rested, I could never ascertain; and hence, how true it
is I cannot now tell. But, inasmuch as this vague report has not been
without a certain suggestive interest to me, however sad, it may prove
the same with some others; and so I will briefly mention it. The report
was this: that Bartleby had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter
Office at Washington, from which he had been suddenly removed by a
change in the administration. When I think over this rumor, hardly can
I express the emotions which seize me. Dead letters! does it not sound
like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a
pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it
than that of continually handling these dead letters, and assorting
them for the flames? For by the cart-load they are annually burned.
Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring—the
finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note
sent in swiftest charity—he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers
any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died
unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved
calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death.
Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!
BENITO CERENO.
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