little excuse for
not being contented now. And yet I was not content.

It seems absurd to say that the drains had anything to do with it, but
the horrible smell which pervaded the office added to the
distastefulness of the place, and made us all feel ill and fretful,
except my uncle, and Moses Benson, the Jew clerk. He was never ill, and
he said he smelt nothing; which shows that one may have a very big nose
to very little purpose.

My uncle pooh-poohed the unwholesome state of the office, for two
reasons which certainly had some weight. The first was that he himself
had been there for five-and-twenty years without suffering by it; and
the second was, that the defects of drainage were so radical that (the
place belonging to that period of house-building when the system of
drainage was often worse than none at all) half the premises, if not
half the street, would have to be pulled down for any effectual remedy.
So it was left as it was, and when Mr. Burton, the head clerk, had worse
headaches than usual, he used to give me sixpence for chloride of lime,
which I distributed at my discretion, and on those days Moses Benson
used generally to say that he "fancied he smelt something."

Moses Benson was an articled clerk to my uncle, but he had no
pretensions to be considered a gentleman. His father kept a small shop
where second-hand watches were the most obvious goods; but the old man
was said to have money, though the watches did not seem to sell very
fast, and his son had duly qualified for his post, and had paid a good
premium. Moses was only two or three years older than I, not that I
could have told anything about his age from his looks. He was sallow,
and had a big nose; his hands were fat, his feet were small, and I think
his head was large, but perhaps his hair made it look larger than it
was, for it was thick and very black, and though it was curly, it was
not like Jem's; the curls were more like short ringlets, and if he bent
over his desk they hid his forehead, and when he put his head back to
think, they lay on his coat-collar. And I suppose it was partly because
he could not smell with his nose, that he used such very strong
hair-oil, and so much of it. It used to make his coat-collar in a horrid
state, but he always kept a little bottle of "scouring drops" on the
ledge of his desk, and when it got very bad, I knelt behind him on the
corner of his stool and scoured his coat-collar with a little bit of
flanne