The firm of Barbox Brothers had been some offshoot or irregular branch of the Public Notary and bill-broking tree.  It had gained for itself a griping reputation before the days of Young Jackson, and the reputation had stuck to it and to him.  As he had imperceptibly come into possession of the dim den up in the corner of a court off Lombard Street, on whose grimy windows the inscription Barbox Brothers had for many long years daily interposed itself between him and the sky, so he had insensibly found himself a personage held in chronic distrust, whom it was essential to screw tight to every transaction in which he engaged, whose word was never to be taken without his attested bond, whom all dealers with openly set up guards and wards against.  This character had come upon him through no act of his own.  It was as if the original Barbox had stretched himself down upon the office floor, and had thither caused to be conveyed Young Jackson in his sleep, and had there effected a metempsychosis and exchange of persons with him.  The discovery—­aided in its turn by the deceit of the only woman he had ever loved, and the deceit of the only friend he had ever made:  who eloped from him to be married together—­the discovery, so followed up, completed what his earliest rearing had begun.  He shrank, abashed, within the form of Barbox, and lifted up his head and heart no more.

But he did at last effect one great release in his condition.  He broke the oar he had plied so long, and he scuttled and sank the galley.  He prevented the gradual retirement of an old conventional business from him, by taking the initiative and retiring from it.  With enough to live on (though, after all, with not too much), he obliterated the firm of Barbox Brothers from the pages of the Post-Office Directory and the face of the earth, leaving nothing of it but its name on two portmanteaus.

“For one must have some name in going about, for people to pick up,” he explained to Mugby High Street, through the Inn window, “and that name at least was real once.  Whereas, Young Jackson!—­Not to mention its being a sadly satirical misnomer for Old Jackson.”

He took up his hat and walked out, just in time to see, passing along on the opposite side of the way, a velveteen man, carrying his day’s dinner in a small bundle that might have been larger without suspicion of gluttony, and pelting away towards the Junction at a great pace.

“There’s Lamps!” said Barbox Brothers.  “And by the bye—­”

Ridiculous, surely, that a man so serious, so self-contained, and not yet three days emancipated from a routine of drudgery, should stand rubbing his chin in the street, in a brown study about Comic Songs.

“Bedside?” said Barbox Brothers testily.  “Sings them at the bedside?  Why at the bedside, unless he goes to bed drunk?  Does, I shouldn’t wonder.  But it’s no business of mine.  Let me see.  Mugby Junction, Mugby Junction.  Where shall I go next?  As it came into my head last night when I woke from an uneasy sleep in the carriage and found myself here, I can go anywhere from here.  Where shall I go?  I’ll go and look at the Junction by daylight.  There’s no hurry, and I may like the look of one Line better than another.”