There is some merit in putting a handsome face upon indigent circumstances.  To bully and swagger away the sense of them, before strangers, may be not always discommendable.  Tibbs, and Bobadil, even when detected, have more of our admiration than contempt.  But for a man to put the cheat upon himself; to play the Bobadil at home; and, steeped in poverty up to the lips, to fancy himself all the while chin-deep in riches, is a strain of constitutional philosophy, and a mastery over fortune, which was reserved for my old friend Captain Jackson.

THE SUPERANNUATED MAN

  Sera tamen respexit
  Libertas.

  VIRGIL.

  A Clerk I was in London gay.

  O’KEEFE.

If peradventure, Reader, it has been thy lot to waste the golden years of thy life—­thy shining youth—­in the irksome confinement of an office; to have thy prison days prolonged through middle age down to decrepitude and silver hairs, without hope of release or respite; to have lived to forget that there are such things as holidays, or to remember them but as the prerogatives of childhood; then, and then only, will you be able to appreciate my deliverance.

It is now six and thirty years since I took my seat at the desk in Mincing-lane.  Melancholy was the transition at fourteen from the abundant play-time, and the frequently-intervening vacations of school days, to the eight, nine, and sometimes ten hours’ a-day attendance at a counting-house.  But time partially reconciles us to anything.  I gradually became content—­doggedly contented, as wild animals in cages.

It is true I had my Sundays to myself; but Sundays, admirable as the institution of them is for purposes of worship, are for that very reason the very worst adapted for days of unbending and recreation.  In particular, there is a gloom for me attendant upon a city Sunday, a weight in the air.  I miss the cheerful cries of London, the music, and the ballad-singers—­the buzz and stirring murmur of the streets.  Those eternal bells depress me.  The closed shops repel me.  Prints, pictures, all the glittering and endless succession of knacks and gewgaws, and ostentatiously displayed wares of tradesmen, which make a week-day saunter through the less busy parts of the metropolis so delightful—­are shut out.  No book-stalls deliciously to idle over—­No busy faces to recreate the idle man who contemplates them ever passing by—­the very face of business a charm by contrast to his temporary relaxation from it.  Nothing to be seen but unhappy countenances—­or half-happy at best—­of emancipated ’prentices and little trades-folks, with here and there a servant maid that has got leave to go out, who, slaving all the week, with the habit has lost almost the capacity of enjoying a free hour; and livelily expressing the hollowness of a day’s pleasuring.  The very strollers in the fields on that day look anything but comfortable.