Now, the utterly unsurmised appearance of Bartleby, tenanting my law-chambers of a Sunday morning, with his cadaverously gentlemanly nonchalance, yet withal firm and self-possessed, had such a strange effect upon me, that incontinently I slunk away from my own door, and did as desired.  But not without sundry twinges of impotent rebellion against the mild effrontery of this unaccountable scrivener.  Indeed, it was his wonderful mildness chiefly, which not only disarmed me, but unmanned me as it were.  For I consider that one, for the time, is a sort of unmanned when he tranquilly permits his hired clerk to dictate to him, and order him away from his own premises.  Furthermore, I was full of uneasiness as to what Bartleby could possibly be doing in my office in his shirt sleeves, and in an otherwise dismantled condition of a Sunday morning.  Was anything amiss going on?  Nay, that was out of the question.  It was not to be thought of for a moment that Bartleby was an immoral person.  But what could he be doing there?—­copying?  Nay again, whatever might be his eccentricities, Bartleby was an eminently decorous person.  He would be the last man to sit down to his desk in any state approaching to nudity.  Besides, it was Sunday; and there was something about Bartleby that forbade the supposition that he would by any secular occupation violate the proprieties of the day.

Nevertheless, my mind was not pacified; and full of a restless curiosity, at last I returned to the door.  Without hindrance I inserted my key, opened it, and entered.  Bartleby was not to be seen.  I looked round anxiously, peeped behind his screen; but it was very plain that he was gone.  Upon more closely examining the place, I surmised that for an indefinite period Bartleby must have ate, dressed, and slept in my office, and that, too without plate, mirror, or bed.  The cushioned seat of a ricketty old sofa in one corner bore the faint impress of a lean, reclining form.  Rolled away under his desk, I found a blanket; under the empty grate, a blacking box and brush; on a chair, a tin basin, with soap and a ragged towel; in a newspaper a few crumbs of ginger-nuts and a morsel of cheese.  Yes, thought I, it is evident enough that Bartleby has been making his home here, keeping bachelor’s hall all by himself.  Immediately then the thought came sweeping across me, what miserable friendlessness and loneliness are here revealed!  His poverty is great; but his solitude, how horrible!  Think of it.  Of a Sunday, Wall-street is deserted as Petra; and every night of every day it is an emptiness.  This building, too, which of week-days hums with industry and life, at nightfall echoes with sheer vacancy, and all through Sunday is forlorn.  And here Bartleby makes his home; sole spectator, of a solitude which he has seen all populous—­a sort of innocent and transformed Marius brooding among the ruins of Carthage!