- end_line
- 11829
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.924Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 11791
- text
- offices high up in the tower; and so well did the thing succeed, that
ultimately the church-yard was invaded for a supplemental edifice,
likewise to be promiscuously rented to the legal crowd. But this new
building very much exceeded the body of the church in height. It was
some seven stories; a fearful pile of Titanic bricks, lifting its tiled
roof almost to a level with the top of the sacred tower.
In this ambitious erection the proprietors went a few steps, or rather a
few stories, too far. For as people would seldom willingly fall into
legal altercations unless the lawyers were always very handy to help
them; so it is ever an object with lawyers to have their offices as
convenient as feasible to the street; on the ground-floor, if possible,
without a single acclivity of a step; but at any rate not in the seventh
story of any house, where their clients might be deterred from employing
them at all, if they were compelled to mount seven long flights of
stairs, one over the other, with very brief landings, in order even to
pay their preliminary retaining fees. So, from some time after its
throwing open, the upper stories of the less ancient attached edifice
remained almost wholly without occupants; and by the forlorn echoes of
their vacuities, right over the head of the business-thriving legal
gentlemen below, must--to some few of them at least--have suggested
unwelcome similitudes, having reference to the crowded state of their
basement-pockets, as compared with the melancholy condition of their
attics;--alas! full purses and empty heads! This dreary posture of
affairs, however, was at last much altered for the better, by the
gradual filling up of the vacant chambers on high, by scores of those
miscellaneous, bread-and-cheese adventurers, and ambiguously
professional nondescripts in very genteel but shabby black, and
unaccountable foreign-looking fellows in blue spectacles; who,
previously issuing from unknown parts of the world, like storks in
Holland, light on the eaves, and in the attics of lofty old buildings in
most large sea-port towns. Here they sit and talk like magpies; or
descending in quest of improbable dinners, are to be seen drawn up along
the curb in front of the eating-houses, like lean rows of broken-hearted
pelicans on a beach; their pockets loose, hanging down and flabby, like
the pelican's pouches when fish are hard to be caught. But these poor,
penniless devils still strive to make ample amends for their physical
forlornness, by resolutely reveling in the region of blissful ideals.
- title
- Chunk 2