The office was by no means altogether composed of steady specimens of clerkdom, but had a large admixture of lively sparks who, though they would never set the Thames on fire, brightened and enlivened our surroundings.

There was one, a literary genius, who had entered the service, I believe by influence, for influence and patronage were in those days not unknown.  He wrote in his spare time the pantomime for a Birmingham theatre; and there constantly fluttered from his desk and circulated through the office, little scraps of paper containing quips and puns and jokes in prose or verse, or acrostics from his prolific pen.  One clever acrostic upon the office boy, which has always remained in my memory, I should like for its delicate irony (worthy of Swift himself) to reproduce; but as that promising youth may still be in the service I feel I had better not, as irony sometimes wounds.  For some time we had in the office an Apollo—­a very Belvidere.  He was a glory introduced into railway life by I know not what influence and disappeared after a time I know not where or why.  A marvel of manly strength and grace and beauty, thirty years of age or so, and faultlessly dressed.  Said to be aristocratically connected, he was the admiration of all and the darling of the young ladies of Derby.  He lodged in fashionable apartments, smoked expensive cigars, attended all public amusements, was affable and charming, but reticent about himself.  Why he ever came amongst us none ever knew; it was a mystery we never fathomed.  He left as he came, a mystery still.

There was an oldish clerk whom we nicknamed Gumpots.  This bore some resemblance to his surname, but there were other reasons which led to the playful designation and which I think justified it.

There was another scribe of quite an elegant sort:  a perambulating tailor’s dummy; a young man, well under thirty.  He was good-looking, as far as regularity of features and a well-formed figure went, but mentally not much to boast of.  He lounged about the station platform and the town displaying his faultlessly fitting fashionable clothes.  They always looked new, and as his salary was not more than 70 pounds a year, and his parents, with whom he lived, were poor, the story that he was provided gratis by an enterprising tailor in town with these suits, on condition that he exhibited himself constantly in public, and told whenever he could who was his outfitter, received general credence, and I believe was true.  He was never known to hurry, mingled little with men and less with women, but moved along in a stiff tailor-dummy fashion with a sort of self-conscious air which seemed to say, “Look at my figure and my clothes, how stylish they are!”