He was one who could do as many sums without pen and paper as a learned pig; who was so given to figures that he knew the number of stairs in every flight he had gone up and down in the metropolis; one who, whatever the subject before him might be, never thought but always counted.

Many who knew the peculiar propensities of Sir Gregory's earlier days thought that Mr.
Minusex was not an unlikely candidate.
The sixth in order was our friend Norman.

The Secretary and the two Assistant-Secretaries, when they first put their heads together on the matter, declared that he was the most useful man in the office.
There was a seventh, named Alphabet Precis.

Mr.Precis' peculiar forte was a singular happiness in official phraseology.

Much that he wrote would doubtless have been considered in the purlieus of Paternoster Row as ungrammatical, if not unintelligible; but according to the syntax of Downing Street, it was equal to Macaulay, and superior to Gibbon.