s so beautiful,
why the moon was made of pearl, and what it was that called to you out
of yonder golden sea; and your heart would fill with a strange gladness,
and you would call back to those unearthly voices, "I am yours, yours,
all yours!"

Thus would this town of bales and merchants, of office-desks and stools,
make poets at evening that she might stone them at noon. For, of course,
she would have forgotten it all in the morning; and it were well not to
remind her with your dreaming eyes of her last night's softness. She
will look back at you with stony misunderstanding, and her new lover
Reality will sharply box your ears.

It is no use reminding the Exchange that it looked like a scene from
Romeo and Juliet in the moonlight. It dare not admit it. But wait
patiently till the evening. Tyre will be yours again with the sunset.
She pretends all day that it is the Mayor in the gilded coach and the
pursy merchantmen she cares for; but it is really you, a poor shabby
poet, she loves all the time, for you only does she wear her gauzy silks
at evening!

CHAPTER IX

A PENITENTIARY OF THE MATHEMATICS

Yes, Mike was some day to be another Kean, and Henry was to prove a
serious rival to Shakespeare; but, meanwhile, they were clerks in the
offices of Tyre.

Of the rigours, and therefore too the truancies and humours of the lot
official, Mike was comparatively so comfortably circumstanced as to have
little knowledge. His father was the king of a little flourishing prison
of desks, and Mike was one of the heirs-apparent. Consequently, his lot,
though dull, was seldom bitter; and many mitigations of it were within
his privilege. With Henry it was different. He was a humble unit among
twenty other slaves, chained to that modern substitute for the galleys,
the desk; and, in a wicked bargain, he had contracted to give his
life-blood from nine in the morning till six in the evening, for sixty
pounds a year, with an occasional "rise," which, after thirty years'
service, might end in your having reached a proud annual three hundred
for the rest of your maimed and narrowed days.

Henry had come to the office straight from school, at the age of
sixteen; and, though classrooms breathe an air sufficiently frigid and
suggestive of inhuman interests and unmeaning discipline, the icy air of
that office had at first almost taken his breath. The place was so
ridiculously serious! There might conceivedly be interests in the world