.
It employed more than two thousand hands; and its works, lit throughout
with the electric light, cover two acres and a quarter of land. One
hundred commercial travellers, at three pounds a week and a commission,
went forth east and west, and north and south, to sell the books of
Meeson (which were largely religious in their nature) in all lands; and
five-and-twenty tame authors (who were illustrated by thirteen tame
artists) sat--at salaries ranging from one to five hundred a year--in
vault-like hutches in the basement, and week by week poured out that
hat-work for which Meeson's was justly famous. Then there were editors
and vice-editors, and heads of the various departments, and sub-heads,
and financial secretaries, and readers, and many managers; but what their
names were no man knew, because at Meeson's all the employees of the
great house were known by numbers; personalities and personal
responsibility being the abomination of the firm. Nor was it allowed to
anyone having dealings with these items ever to see the same number
twice, presumably for fear lest the number should remember that he was a
man and a brother, and his heart should melt towards the unfortunate, and
the financial interests of Meeson's should suffer. In short, Meeson's was
an establishment created for and devoted to money-making, and the fact
was kept studiously and even insolently before the eyes of everybody
connected with it--which was, of course, as it should be, in this happy
land of commerce. After all that has been written, the reader will not be
surprised to learn that the partners in Meeson's were rich beyond the
dreams of avarice. Their palaces would have been a wonder even in ancient
Babylon, and would have excited admiration in the corruptest and most
luxurious days of Rome. Where could one see such horses, such carriages,
such galleries of sculpture or such collections of costly gems as at the
palatial halls of Messrs. Meeson, Addison, and Roscoe?

"And to think," as the Mighty Meeson himself would say, with a lordly
wave of his right hand, to some astonished wretch of an author whom he
has chosen to overwhelm with the sight of this magnificence, "to think
that all this comes out of the brains of chaps like you! Why, young man,
I tell you that if all the money that has been paid to you scribblers
since the days of Elizabeth were added together it would not come up to
my little pile; but, mind you, it ain't so much fiction that has d