their contentment with the drab lives they led, at their
self-congratulation for "having a job" at Breck and Company's.

"You don't mean to say you like this kind of work?" I exclaimed one day
to Johnny Hedges, as we sat on barrels of XXXX flour looking out at the
hot sunlight in the alley.

"It ain't a question of liking it, Beau," he rebuked me. "It's all very
well for you to talk, since your father's a millionaire" (a fiction so
firmly embedded in their heads that no amount of denial affected it),
"but what do you think would happen to me if I was fired? I couldn't go
home and take it easy--you bet not. I just want to shake hands with
myself when I think that I've got a home, and a job like this. I know a
feller--a hard worker he was, too who walked the pavements for three
months when the Colvers failed, and couldn't get nothing, and took to
drink, and the last I heard of him he was sleeping in police stations and
walking the ties, and his wife's a waitress at a cheap hotel. Don't you
think it's easy to get a job."

I was momentarily sobered by the earnestness with which he brought home
to me the relentlessness of our civilization. It seemed incredible. I
should have learned a lesson in that store. Barring a few discordant days
when the orders came in too fast or when we were short handed because of
sickness, it was a veritable hive of happiness; morning after morning
clerks and porters arrived, pale, yet smiling, and laboured with
cheerfulness from eight o'clock until six, and departed as cheerfully for
modest homes in obscure neighbourhoods that seemed to me areas of exile.
They were troubled with no visions of better things. When the travelling
men came in from the "road" there was great hilarity. Important
personages, these, looked up to by the city clerks; jolly, reckless,
Elizabethan-like rovers, who had tasted of the wine of liberty--and of
other wines with the ineradicable lust for the road in their blood. No
more routine for Jimmy Bowles, who was king of them all. I shudder to
think how much of my knowledge of life I owe to this Jimmy, whose stories
would have filled a quarto volume, but could on no account have been
published; for a self-respecting post-office would not have allowed them
to pass through the mails. As it was, Jimmy gave them circulation enough.
I can still see his round face, with the nose just indicated, his wicked,
twinkling little eyes, and I can hear his husky voice fall to a whisper
w