officials was reading
to him in a low hurried voice from a thick vellum book with large clasps.
It was perfectly evident that the more the clerk read, the less the man
with the blue apron understood about the matter. When the volume was
first brought down, he took off his hat, smoothed down his hair, smiled
with great self-satisfaction, and looked up in the reader's face with the
air of a man who had made up his mind to recollect every word he heard.
The first two or three lines were intelligible enough; but then the
technicalities began, and the little man began to look rather dubious.
Then came a whole string of complicated trusts, and he was regularly at
sea. As the reader proceeded, it was quite apparent that it was a
hopeless case, and the little man, with his mouth open and his eyes fixed
upon his face, looked on with an expression of bewilderment and
perplexity irresistibly ludicrous.

A little further on, a hard-featured old man with a deeply-wrinkled face,
was intently perusing a lengthy will with the aid of a pair of horn
spectacles: occasionally pausing from his task, and slily noting down
some brief memorandum of the bequests contained in it. Every wrinkle
about his toothless mouth, and sharp keen eyes, told of avarice and
cunning. His clothes were nearly threadbare, but it was easy to see that
he wore them from choice and not from necessity; all his looks and
gestures down to the very small pinches of snuff which he every now and
then took from a little tin canister, told of wealth, and penury, and
avarice.

As he leisurely closed the register, put up his spectacles, and folded
his scraps of paper in a large leathern pocket-book, we thought what a
nice hard bargain he was driving with some poverty-stricken legatee, who,
tired of waiting year after year, until some life-interest should fall
in, was selling his chance, just as it began to grow most valuable, for a
twelfth part of its worth. It was a good speculation--a very safe one.
The old man stowed his pocket-book carefully in the breast of his
great-coat, and hobbled away with a leer of triumph. That will had made
him ten years younger at the lowest computation.

Having commenced our observations, we should certainly have extended them
to another dozen of people at least, had not a sudden shutting up and
putting away of the worm-eaten old books, warned us that the time for
closing the office had arrived; and thus deprived us of a pleasure, and
s