Like as he is to look at, so is his apartment in the dusk of the present afternoon.  Rusty, out of date, withdrawing from attention, able to afford it.  Heavy, broad-backed, old-fashioned, mahogany-and-horsehair chairs, not easily lifted; obsolete tables with spindle-legs and dusty baize covers; presentation prints of the holders of great titles in the last generation or the last but one, environ him.  A thick and dingy Turkey-carpet muffles the floor where he sits, attended by two candles in old-fashioned silver candlesticks that give a very insufficient light to his large room.  The titles on the backs of his books have retired into the binding; everything that can have a lock has got one; no key is visible.  Very few loose papers are about.  He has some manuscript near him, but is not referring to it.  With the round top of an inkstand and two broken bits of sealing-wax he is silently and slowly working out whatever train of indecision is in his mind.  Now the inkstand top is in the middle, now the red bit of sealing-wax, now the black bit.  That’s not it.  Mr. Tulkinghorn must gather them all up and begin again.

Here, beneath the painted ceiling, with foreshortened Allegory staring down at his intrusion as if it meant to swoop upon him, and he cutting it dead, Mr. Tulkinghorn has at once his house and office.  He keeps no staff, only one middle-aged man, usually a little out at elbows, who sits in a high pew in the hall and is rarely overburdened with business.  Mr. Tulkinghorn is not in a common way.  He wants no clerks.  He is a great reservoir of confidences, not to be so tapped.  His clients want him; he is all in all.  Drafts that he requires to be drawn are drawn by special-pleaders in the temple on mysterious instructions; fair copies that he requires to be made are made at the stationers’, expense being no consideration.  The middle-aged man in the pew knows scarcely more of the affairs of the peerage than any crossing-sweeper in Holborn.

The red bit, the black bit, the inkstand top, the other inkstand top, the little sand-box.  So!  You to the middle, you to the right, you to the left.  This train of indecision must surely be worked out now or never.  Now!  Mr. Tulkinghorn gets up, adjusts his spectacles, puts on his hat, puts the manuscript in his pocket, goes out, tells the middle-aged man out at elbows, “I shall be back presently.”  Very rarely tells him anything more explicit.

Mr. Tulkinghorn goes, as the crow came—­not quite so straight, but nearly—­to Cook’s Court, Cursitor Street.  To Snagsby’s, Law-Stationer’s, Deeds engrossed and copied, Law-Writing executed in all its branches, &c., &c., &c.

It is somewhere about five or six o’clock in the afternoon, and a balmy fragrance of warm tea hovers in Cook’s Court.  It hovers about Snagsby’s door.  The hours are early there:  dinner at half-past one and supper at half-past nine.  Mr. Snagsby was about to descend into the subterranean regions to take tea when he looked out of his door just now and saw the crow who was out late.