This appeal to my fellow-feeling was hardly to be resisted.  At all events, I saw that go he would not.  So I made up my mind to let him stay, resolving, nevertheless, to see to it, that during the afternoon he had to do with my less important papers.

Nippers, the second on my list, was a whiskered, sallow, and, upon the whole, rather piratical-looking young man of about five and twenty.  I always deemed him the victim of two evil powers—­ambition and indigestion.  The ambition was evinced by a certain impatience of the duties of a mere copyist, an unwarrantable usurpation of strictly professional affairs, such as the original drawing up of legal documents.  The indigestion seemed betokened in an occasional nervous testiness and grinning irritability, causing the teeth to audibly grind together over mistakes committed in copying; unnecessary maledictions, hissed, rather than spoken, in the heat of business; and especially by a continual discontent with the height of the table where he worked.  Though of a very ingenious mechanical turn, Nippers could never get this table to suit him.  He put chips under it, blocks of various sorts, bits of pasteboard, and at last went so far as to attempt an exquisite adjustment by final pieces of folded blotting paper.  But no invention would answer.  If, for the sake of easing his back, he brought the table lid at a sharp angle well up towards his chin, and wrote there like a man using the steep roof of a Dutch house for his desk:—­then he declared that it stopped the circulation in his arms.  If now he lowered the table to his waistbands, and stooped over it in writing, then there was a sore aching in his back.  In short, the truth of the matter was, Nippers knew not what he wanted.  Or, if he wanted any thing, it was to be rid of a scrivener’s table altogether.  Among the manifestations of his diseased ambition was a fondness he had for receiving visits from certain ambiguous-looking fellows in seedy coats, whom he called his clients.  Indeed I was aware that not only was he, at times, considerable of a ward-politician, but he occasionally did a little business at the Justices’ courts, and was not unknown on the steps of the Tombs.  I have good reason to believe, however, that one individual who called upon him at my chambers, and who, with a grand air, he insisted was his client, was no other than a dun, and the alleged title-deed, a bill.  But with all his failings, and the annoyances he caused me, Nippers, like his compatriot Turkey, was a very useful man to me; wrote a neat, swift hand; and, when he chose, was not deficient in a gentlemanly sort of deportment.  Added to this, he always dressed in a gentlemanly sort of way; and so, incidentally, reflected credit upon my chambers.  Whereas with respect to Turkey, I had much ado to keep him from being a reproach to me.  His clothes were apt to look oily and smell of eating-houses.  He wore his pantaloons very loose and baggy in summer.