y chance awakened at the door of the
Circumlocution Office, originated in this feeling. He asked his partner
to explain the invention to him; 'having a lenient consideration,' he
stipulated, 'for my being no workman, Doyce.'

'No workman?' said Doyce. 'You would have been a thorough workman if you
had given yourself to it. You have as good a head for understanding such
things as I have met with.'

'A totally uneducated one, I am sorry to add,' said Clennam.

'I don't know that,' returned Doyce, 'and I wouldn't have you say
that. No man of sense who has been generally improved, and has improved
himself, can be called quite uneducated as to anything. I don't
particularly favour mysteries. I would as soon, on a fair and clear
explanation, be judged by one class of man as another, provided he had
the qualification I have named.'

'At all events,' said Clennam--'this sounds as if we were exchanging
compliments, but we know we are not--I shall have the advantage of as
plain an explanation as can be given.'

'Well!' said Daniel, in his steady even way,'I'll try to make it so.'

He had the power, often to be found in union with such a character, of
explaining what he himself perceived, and meant, with the direct force
and distinctness with which it struck his own mind. His manner of
demonstration was so orderly and neat and simple, that it was not easy
to mistake him. There was something almost ludicrous in the complete
irreconcilability of a vague conventional notion that he must be a
visionary man, with the precise, sagacious travelling of his eye and
thumb over the plans, their patient stoppages at particular points,
their careful returns to other points whence little channels of
explanation had to be traced up, and his steady manner of making
everything good and everything sound at each important stage, before
taking his hearer on a line's-breadth further. His dismissal of himself
from his description, was hardly less remarkable. He never said, I
discovered this adaptation or invented that combination; but showed the
whole thing as if the Divine artificer had made it, and he had happened
to find it; so modest he was about it, such a pleasant touch of respect
was mingled with his quiet admiration of it, and so calmly convinced he
was that it was established on irrefragable laws.

Not only that evening, but for several succeeding evenings, Clennam was
quite charmed by this investigation. The more he pursued it, and the