on me now. "His dinner is
ready. Won't he dine to-day, either? Or does he live without dining?"

"Lives without dining," said I, and closed his eyes.

"Eh!--He's asleep, aint he?"

"With kings and counselors," murmured I.

* * * * * * * *

There would seem little need for proceeding further in this history.
Imagination will readily supply the meager recital of poor Bartleby's
interment. But ere parting with the reader, let me say, that if this
little narrative has sufficiently interested him, to awaken curiosity as
to who Bartleby was, and what manner of life he led prior to the present
narrator's making his acquaintance, I can only reply, that in such
curiosity I fully share, but am wholly unable to gratify it. Yet here I
hardly know whether I should divulge one little item of rumor, which
came to my ear a few months after the scrivener's decease. Upon what
basis it rested, I could never ascertain; and hence, how true it is I
cannot now tell. But inasmuch as this vague report has not been without
certain strange suggestive interest to me, however sad, it may prove the
same with some others; and so I will briefly mention it. The report was
this: that Bartleby had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter
Office at Washington, from which he had been suddenly removed by a
change in the administration. When I think over this rumor, I cannot
adequately express the emotions which seize me. Dead letters! does it
not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone
to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten
it than that of continually handling these dead letters, and assorting
them for the flames? For by the cart-load they are annually burned.
Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring:--the
finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note
sent in swiftest charity:--he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor
hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those
who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved
calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death.

Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!

End of Project Gutenberg's Bartleby, The Scrivener, by Herman Melville

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