42 Calamities of a Clerk. [Juxy, 
by any light afforded by the complaints of one who had lived so few 
years in the world as myself. He was sure I should begin to taste the 
sweets of my employment by and by. He thought that “lads should 
expect to meet with a spice of difficulty, and ought not to care a fig for 
it.” Above all, he had no notion of boys being idle. I was made over, 
in continuity, to Messrs. Gladwin and Co. 
The first two years of my service were rated at nothing, though I 
was myself continually rated at a great deal. There had been a verbal 
understanding between the house and my father, to the indefinite pur- 
port, that I should receive, after the lapse of that time, a genteel salary. 
The event showed, that gentility, with Messrs. Gladwin and Co., com- 
menced at fifteen pounds a year. At least, a check for this amount 
(and J thought it a check in a double sense) was put into my hands, as 
a twelvemonth’s stipend—though I should observe that my liberal 
employers had the grace, or the policy, to call it a present, rather than a 
salary. This species of encouragement was admitted, even by pater- 
nal consent, to be somewhat in the small way: but a special arrange- 
ment, thereupon made, ensured to my exertions of the following year 
the compliment of twice the above sum; and the firm itself, of its own 
generous accord, proposed, subsequently, that my remuneration should 
take an annual ascent of ten pounds: by which example of arithmetical 
progression, I should have actually come to be in the receipt, when 
twenty-two years of age, of eighty pounds per annum. 
After an ample discharge of all the lowest functions of junior clerk, 
I was at length permitted to mount up into the situation of under book- 
keeper. In this new department, if there was less fatigue of body, there 
was far more labour of head. Those only who have practically known 
the dejection of spirit, and the general forfeiture of all healthful feeling, 
which are produced by long hours of confinement to a desk, with the 
chest narrowed forwards, and the throbbing head stooping down over 
a mass of white paper, and a labyrinth of black figures, while a dim 
and melancholy light half excludes the consciousness of day, and seems 
scarce willing to lend itself to the office it looks so sadly upon ; those 
only who have been forced to know this, can fully conceive what I now 
endured. I became a perfect martyr to the dizzing torments of day- 
book and ledger. The very habits of my occupation became a kind of 
disease. The mystical tyranny of arithmetic pursued me through every 
action and circumstance. If I sought the relief of variety and motion 
by undertaking some matter of business out of doors, the numerical 
process haunted me along the streets, and I found myself for ever 
making vain calculations, and fretting my brain with false additions, or 
multiplications without result! If I lay down at night, and my head 
exhausted itself into sleep, the phantoms of figures, preternaturally 
enlarged, and endowed with powers of movement and speech, danced 
in combinations horribly grotesque around me, and mocked me with 
threats quaint but dreary, for the presumption of endeavouring to over- 
come, singly, the force of numbers! The feebleness of my health was 
thus made worse by the strength of hypochondria, while the wonted 
paleness of my countenance was only qualified by a mixture with the 
saffron hue that is incidental to a bilious habit, and is always aggravated 
by a sedentary course of life. 
_ To such a thing as this was I reduced—with enough left of vitality 
to go on, but not enough of spirit to complain. To those who are 
