Hundreds of times did I listen with vain expectations to the footsteps on the stairs below—­footsteps of attorneys and clerks, messengers and office-boys.  I knew them all, and that was all I knew of them.  Down below at the bottom flight they tramped, and there they mostly stopped.  The ground floor was evidently the best for business; but some came higher, to the first floor.  That was a good position; there were plenty of footsteps, and I could tell they were the footsteps of clients.  A few came a little higher still, and then my hopes rose with the footsteps.  Now some one had come up to the third floor:  he stopped!  Alas! there was the knock, one single hard knock:  it was a junior clerk.  The sound came all too soon for me, and I turned from my own door to my little den and looked out of my window up into the sky, from whence it seemed I might just as well expect a brief as from the regions below.

This was not quite true.  On another occasion some bold adventurer ascended with asthmatical energy to the fourth floor, and I thought as I heard him wheeze he would never have breath enough to get down again, and wondered if the good-natured attorneys kept these wheezy old gentlemen out of charity.  But it was rare indeed that the climber, unless it was the rent collector, reached that floor.

The fifth landing was too remote for the postman, for I never got a letter—­at least so it seemed; and no squirrel watching from the topmost bough of the tallest pine could be more lonely than I.

At last I thought a step had passed even the fourth landing, and was approaching mine; but I would not think too fast, and damped my hopes a little on purpose lest they should burn too brightly and too fast.  I was not mistaken:  there was a footstep on my landing, and I listened for the one heavy knock.  It seemed to me I waited about an hour and a half, judging by the palpitations of my heart, and wished the man had knocked as vigorously.  But I was rewarded:  the knocker fell, and as my boy was away with the toothache, I opened the door myself.  He was the same wheezy man I had heard below some time before; and I really seem to have liked asthmatical people ever since—­except when I became a judge and they disturbed me in court.

“Papers!”

That is enough to say to any one who understands the situation.  You may be sure I gave them my best attention, that they were finished promptly, and, as I hoped, in the best style.  If I had required any additional incentive to keep me to my daily task of watching, this would have been sufficient; but I wanted none.  I knew that my whole future depended upon it, and there I was from ten in the morning till ten at night.

My first fee was small, but it was the biggest fee I ever had.  It was 10s. 6d.  I was only a special pleader, and with some papers our fees were even less; we only had to draw pleadings, not to open them in court—­that comes after you are called to the Bar.  Drawing them means really drawing the points of the case for counsel, and opening them means a gabbling epitome of them to the jury, which no jury in this world ever yet understood or ever will.