I was usually at Hammersmith about half the week, and when I was at Hammersmith I haunted Richmond:  whereof separately by-and-by.  Herbert would often come to Hammersmith when I was there, and I think at those seasons his father would occasionally have some passing perception that the opening he was looking for, had not appeared yet.  But in the general tumbling up of the family, his tumbling out in life somewhere, was a thing to transact itself somehow.  In the meantime Mr. Pocket grew greyer, and tried oftener to lift himself out of his perplexities by the hair.  While Mrs. Pocket tripped up the family with her footstool, read her book of dignities, lost her pocket-handkerchief, told us about her grandpapa, and taught the young idea how to shoot, by shooting it into bed whenever it attracted her notice.

As I am now generalizing a period of my life with the object of clearing my way before me, I can scarcely do so better than by at once completing the description of our usual manners and customs at Barnard’s Inn.

We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as people could make up their minds to give us.  We were always more or less miserable, and most of our acquaintance were in the same condition.  There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did.  To the best of my belief, our case was in the last aspect a rather common one.

Every morning, with an air ever new, Herbert went into the City to look about him.  I often paid him a visit in the dark back-room in which he consorted with an ink-jar, a hat-peg, a coal-box, a string-box, an almanack, a desk and stool, and a ruler; and I do not remember that I ever saw him do anything else but look about him.  If we all did what we undertake to do, as faithfully as Herbert did, we might live in a Republic of the Virtues.  He had nothing else to do, poor fellow, except at a certain hour of every afternoon to “go to Lloyd’s” — in observance of a ceremony of seeing his principal, I think.  He never did anything else in connexion with Lloyd’s that I could find out, except come back again.  When he felt his case unusually serious, and that he positively must find an opening, he would go on ’Change at a busy time, and walk in and out, in a kind of gloomy country dance figure, among the assembled magnates.  “For,” says Herbert to me, coming home to dinner on one of those special occasions, “I find the truth to be, Handel, that an opening won’t come to one, but one must go to it — so I have been.”

If we had been less attached to one another, I think we must have hated one another regularly every morning.  I detested the chambers beyond expression at that period of repentance, and could not endure the sight of the Avenger’s livery:  which had a more expensive and a less remunerative appearance then, than at any other time in the four-and-twenty hours.  As we got more and more into debt breakfast became a hollower and hollower form, and, being on one occasion at breakfast-time threatened (by letter) with legal proceedings, “not unwholly unconnected,” as my local paper might put it, “with jewellery,” I went so far as to seize the Avenger by his blue collar and shake him off his feet — so that he was actually in the air, like a booted Cupid — for presuming to suppose that we wanted a roll.