80 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT. 



ness, betraying no consciousness of having risen in life, 

 not altering his demeanour by one jot or tittle, and 

 except in his thoughts of the future of domestic felicity 

 which was now virtually secure to him, not finding 

 himself a happier man. After a day spent in the 

 uncongenial drudgery of running up columns of figures, 

 he did not experience in literary composition that de- 

 licious freshness which it had formerly yielded him. 

 1 For the first six months of my new employment/ he 

 says, 'I found myself unable to make my old use of 

 the leisure hours which, I found, I could still command. 

 There was nothing very intellectual, in the higher sense 

 of the term, in recording the bank's transactions, or in 

 summing up columns of figures, or in doing business 

 over the counter; and yet the fatigue induced was a 

 fatigue, not of sinew and muscle, but of nerve and brain, 

 which, if it did not quite disqualify me for my former 

 intellectual amusements, at least greatly disinclined me 

 towards them, and rendered me a considerably more in- 

 dolent sort of person than either before or since. It is 

 asserted by artists of discriminating eye that the human 

 hand bears an expression stamped upon it by the general 

 character as surely as the human face ; and I certainly 

 used to be struck, during this transition period, by the 

 relaxed and idle expression that had on the sudden been 

 assumed by mine. And the slackened hands repre- 

 sented, I too surely felt, a slackened mind. The un- 

 intellectual toils of the labouring man have been occa- 

 sionally represented as less favourable to mental cultiva- 

 tion than the semi-intellectual employments of that class 

 immediately above him, to which our clerks, shopmen, 

 and humbler accountants belong ; but it will be found 

 that exactly the reverse is the case, and that, though a 

 certain conventional gentility of manner and appearance 



