“Say, Beau,” Johnny Hedges would ask, when I appeared of a morning, “what happened in the great world last night?”

I had an affection for them, these fellow-clerks, and I often wondered at their contentment with the drab lives they led, at their self-congratulation for “having a job” at Breck and Company’s.

“You don’t mean to say you like this kind of work?” I exclaimed one day to Johnny Hedges, as we sat on barrels of XXXX flour looking out at the hot sunlight in the alley.

“It ain’t a question of liking it, Beau,” he rebuked me.  “It’s all very well for you to talk, since your father’s a millionaire” (a fiction so firmly embedded in their heads that no amount of denial affected it), “but what do you think would happen to me if I was fired?  I couldn’t go home and take it easy—­you bet not.  I just want to shake hands with myself when I think that I’ve got a home, and a job like this.  I know a feller—­a hard worker he was, too who walked the pavements for three months when the Colvers failed, and couldn’t get nothing, and took to drink, and the last I heard of him he was sleeping in police stations and walking the ties, and his wife’s a waitress at a cheap hotel.  Don’t you think it’s easy to get a job.”

I was momentarily sobered by the earnestness with which he brought home to me the relentlessness of our civilization.  It seemed incredible.  I should have learned a lesson in that store.  Barring a few discordant days when the orders came in too fast or when we were short handed because of sickness, it was a veritable hive of happiness; morning after morning clerks and porters arrived, pale, yet smiling, and laboured with cheerfulness from eight o’clock until six, and departed as cheerfully for modest homes in obscure neighbourhoods that seemed to me areas of exile.  They were troubled with no visions of better things.  When the travelling men came in from the “road” there was great hilarity.  Important personages, these, looked up to by the city clerks; jolly, reckless, Elizabethan-like rovers, who had tasted of the wine of liberty—­and of other wines with the ineradicable lust for the road in their blood.  No more routine for Jimmy Bowles, who was king of them all.  I shudder to think how much of my knowledge of life I owe to this Jimmy, whose stories would have filled a quarto volume, but could on no account have been published; for a self-respecting post-office would not have allowed them to pass through the mails.  As it was, Jimmy gave them circulation enough.  I can still see his round face, with the nose just indicated, his wicked, twinkling little eyes, and I can hear his husky voice fall to a whisper when “the boss” passed through the store.  Jimmy, when visiting us, always had a group around him.  His audacity with women amazed me, for he never passed one of the “lady clerks” without some form of caress, which they resented but invariably laughed at.  One day he imparted to me his code of morality:  he never made love to another man’s wife, so he assured me, if he knew the man!  The secret of life he had discovered in laughter, and by laughter he sold quantities of Cousin Robert’s groceries.