My uncle pooh-poohed the unwholesome state of the office, for two reasons which certainly had some weight.  The first was that he himself had been there for five-and-twenty years without suffering by it; and the second was, that the defects of drainage were so radical that (the place belonging to that period of house-building when the system of drainage was often worse than none at all) half the premises, if not half the street, would have to be pulled down for any effectual remedy.  So it was left as it was, and when Mr. Burton, the head clerk, had worse headaches than usual, he used to give me sixpence for chloride of lime, which I distributed at my discretion, and on those days Moses Benson used generally to say that he “fancied he smelt something.”

Moses Benson was an articled clerk to my uncle, but he had no pretensions to be considered a gentleman.  His father kept a small shop where second-hand watches were the most obvious goods; but the old man was said to have money, though the watches did not seem to sell very fast, and his son had duly qualified for his post, and had paid a good premium.  Moses was only two or three years older than I, not that I could have told anything about his age from his looks.  He was sallow, and had a big nose; his hands were fat, his feet were small, and I think his head was large, but perhaps his hair made it look larger than it was, for it was thick and very black, and though it was curly, it was not like Jem’s; the curls were more like short ringlets, and if he bent over his desk they hid his forehead, and when he put his head back to think, they lay on his coat-collar.  And I suppose it was partly because he could not smell with his nose, that he used such very strong hair-oil, and so much of it.  It used to make his coat-collar in a horrid state, but he always kept a little bottle of “scouring drops” on the ledge of his desk, and when it got very bad, I knelt behind him on the corner of his stool and scoured his coat-collar with a little bit of flannel.  Not that I did it half so well as he could.  He wore very odd-looking clothes, but he took great care of them, and was always touching them up, and “reviving” his hat with one of Mrs. O’Flannagan’s irons.  He used to sell bottles of the scouring drops to the other clerks, and once he got me to get my mother to buy some.  He gave me a good many little odd jobs to do for him, but he always thanked me, and from the beginning to the end of our acquaintance he was invariably kind.

I remember a very odd scene that happened at the beginning of it.

Mr. Burton (the other clerk, whose time was to expire the following year, which was to make a vacancy for me) was a very different man from Moses Benson.  He was respectably connected, and looked down on “the Jew-boy,” but he was hot-tempered, and rather slow-witted, and I think Moses could manage him; and I think it was he who kept their constant “tiffs” from coming to real quarrels.