o'clock exactly," he added, turning to Cameron
with a pleasant smile.

Mr. Fleming accompanied Cameron to the door.

"Now, a word with you, Mr. Cameron. You may find Mr. Bates a little
difficult--he is something of a driver--but, remember, he is in charge
of this office; I never interfere with his orders."

"I understand, Sir," said Cameron, resolving that, at all costs, he
should obey Mr. Bates' orders, if only to show the general manager he
could recognise and appreciate a gentleman when he saw one.

Mr. Fleming was putting it mildly when he described Mr. Bates as
"something of a driver." The whole office staff, from Jimmy, the office
boy, to Jacobs, the gentle, white-haired clerk, whose desk was in the
farthest corner of the room, felt the drive. He was not only office
manager, but office master as well. His rule was absolute, and from his
decisions there was no appeal. The general manager went on the theory
that it was waste of energy to keep a dog and bark himself. In the
policy that governed the office there were two rules which Mr. Bates
enforced with the utmost rigidity--the first, namely, that every member
of the staff must be in his or her place and ready for work when the
clock struck eight; the other, that each member of the staff must work
independently of every other member. A man must know his business, and
go through with it; if he required instructions, he must apply to the
office manager. But, as a rule, one experience of such application
sufficed for the whole period of a clerk's service in the office of the
Metropolitan Transportation & Cartage Company, for Mr. Bates was gifted
with such an exquisiteness of ironical speech that the whole staff were
wont to pause in the rush of their work to listen and to admire when
a new member was unhappy enough to require instructions, their silent
admiration acting as a spur to Mr. Bates' ingenuity in the invention of
ironical discourse.

Of the peculiarities and idiosyncrasies of Mr. Bates' system, however,
Cameron was quite ignorant; nor had his experience in the office of
Messrs. Rae & Macpherson been such as to impress upon him the necessity
of a close observation of the flight of time. It did not disturb him,
therefore, to notice as he strolled into the offices of the Metropolitan
Transportation & Cartage Company the next morning that the hands of the
clock showed six minutes past the hour fixed for the beginning of
the day's work. The office staff shiv