That some proportion of them do become beggars, thieves, paupers, sharpers, other things quite unfit for the ear of the young person--a disconcerting consideration; such ears cannot be too carefully guarded.

That, though the occupations named are entirely normal to all well-ordered states, descendants of persons in those occupations tend to become "subnormal"-- so runs the cant of it--something handicapped by that haphazard bullet of a lifetime since, fired to advance the glorious cause of--foreign commerce, or the like.
* * * * * Mr.Mitchell occupied five rooms lined with law books and musty with the smell of leather.

These rooms ranged end to end, each with a door that opened upon a dark hallway; a waiting-room in front, the private office at the rear, to which no client was ever admitted directly.

Depressed by delay, subdued by an overflow of thick volumes, when he reaches a suitable dejection he is tip-toed through dismal antechambers of wisdom, appalled by tall bookstacks, ushered into the leather-chaired office, and there further crushed by long shelves of dingy tin boxes, each box crowded with weighty secrets and shelved papers of fabulous moment and urgency; the least paper of the smallest box more important--the unfortunate client is clear on that point--than any contemptible need of his own.

Cowed and chastened, he is now ready to pay a fee suitable to the mind that has absorbed all the wisdom of those many bookshelves; or meekly to accept as justice any absurdity or monstrosity of the law.
Mr.Mitchell was greeted by a slim, swarthy, black-eyed, elderly person of twenty-five or thirty, with a crooked nose and a crooked mind, half clerk and half familiar spirit--Mr.Joseph Pelman, to wit; who appeared perpetually on the point of choking himself by suppressed chucklings at his principal's cleverness and the simplicity of dupes.
"Well, Joe ?" "Two to see you, sir," said Joe, his face lit up with sprightly malice.
"On the same lay.