plete.
Edward was forty-nine, a small, thin, stunted man, with a look of narrow
cunning, of petty shrewdness working without imagination. He had been
clerk to Lawyer Ford for thirty-five years, and had also furtively
practised for himself. During this period his mode of life had never
varied, save once, and that only a year ago. At the age of fourteen he
sat in a grimy room with an old man on one side of him, a copying-press
on the other, and a law-stationer's almanac in front, and he earned half
a crown a week. At the age of forty-eight he still sat in the same grimy
room (of which the ceiling had meanwhile been whitened three times),
with the same copying-press and the almanac of the same law-stationers,
and he earned thirty shillings a week. But now he, Edward Beechinor, was
the old man, and the indispensable lad of fourteen, who had once been
himself, was another lad, perhaps thirtieth of the dynasty of
office-boys. Throughout this interminable and sterile desert of time he
had drawn the same deeds, issued the same writs, written the same
letters, kept the same accounts, lied the same lies, and thought the
same thoughts. He had learnt nothing except craft, and forgotten nothing
except happiness. He had never married, never loved, never been a rake,
nor deviated from respectability. He was a success because he had
conceived an object, and by sheer persistence attained it. In the eyes
of Bursley people he was a very decent fellow, a steady fellow, a
confirmed bachelor, a close un, a knowing customer, a curmudgeon, an
excellent clerk, a narrow-minded ass, a good Wesleyan, a thrifty
individual, and an intelligent burgess--according to the point of view.
The lifelong operation of rigorous habit had sunk him into a groove as
deep as the canon of some American river. His ideas on every subject
were eternally and immutably fixed, and, without being altogether aware
of it, he was part of the solid foundation of England's greatness. In
1892, when the whole of the Five Towns was agitated by the great probate
case of Wilbraham _v._ Wilbraham, in which Mr. Ford acted for the
defendants, Beechinor, then aged forty-eight, was torn from his stool
and sent out to Rio de Janeiro as part of a commission to take the
evidence of an important witness who had declined all offers to come
home.

The old clerk was full of pride and self-importance at being thus
selected, but secretly he shrank from the journey, the mere idea of
which filled