he lay it by? And if he lays it by, what becomes of his portfolio
when he is unchained for a holiday? The wastepaper baskets of
these closed counting-houses would let me into many hints of
business matters if I had the exploration of them; and what secrets
of the heart should I discover on the ‘pads’ of the young clerks –
the sheets of cartridge-paper and blotting-paper interposed between
their writing and their desks! Pads are taken into confidence on
the tenderest occasions, and oftentimes when I have made a business
visit, and have sent in my name from the outer office, have I had
it forced on my discursive notice that the officiating young
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gentleman has over and over again inscribed AMELIA, in ink of
various dates, on corners of his pad. Indeed, the pad may be
regarded as the legitimate modern successor of the old forest-tree:
whereon these young knights (having no attainable forest nearer
than Epping) engrave the names of their mistresses. After all, it
is a more satisfactory process than carving, and can be oftener
repeated. So these courts in their Sunday rest are courts of Love
Omnipotent (I rejoice to bethink myself), dry as they look. And
here is Garraway’s, bolted and shuttered hard and fast! It is
possible to imagine the man who cuts the sandwiches, on his back in
a hayfield; it is possible to imagine his desk, like the desk of a
clerk at church, without him; but imagination is unable to pursue
the men who wait at Garraway’s all the week for the men who never
come. When they are forcibly put out of Garraway’s on Saturday
night – which they must be, for they never would go out of their
own accord – where do they vanish until Monday morning? On the
first Sunday that I ever strayed here, I expected to find them
hovering about these lanes, like restless ghosts, and trying to
peep into Garraway’s through chinks in the shutters, if not
endeavouring to turn the lock of the door with false keys, picks,
and screw-drivers. But the wonder is, that they go clean away!
And now I think of it, the wonder is, that every working-day
pervader of these scenes goes clean away. The man who sells the
dogs’ collars and the little toy coal-scuttles, feels under as
great an obligation to go afar off, as Glyn and Co., or Smith,
Payne, and Smith. There is an old monastery-crypt under Garraway’s
(I have been in it among the port wine), and perhaps Garraway’s,
taking pity on the mouldy men who wait in its public-room all their
lives, gives them cool house-room down there over Sundays; but the
catacombs of Paris would not be large enough to hold the rest of
the missing. This characteristic of London City greatly helps its
being the quaint place it is in the weekly pause of business, and
greatly helps my Sunday sensation in it of being the Last Man. In
my solitude, the ticket-porters being all gone with the rest, I
venture to breathe to the quiet bricks and stones my confidential
wonderment why a ticket-porter, who never does any work with his
hands, is bound to wear a white apron, and why a great
Ecclesiastical Dignitary, who never does any work with his hands
either, is equally bound to wear a black one.
CHAPTER XXIV – AN OLD STAGE-COACHING HOUSE
Before the waitress had shut the door, I had forgotten how many
stage-coaches she said used to change horses in the town every day.
But it was of little moment; any high number would do as well as
another. It had been a great stage-coaching town in the great
stage-coaching times, and the ruthless railways had killed and
buried it.
The sign of the house was the Dolphin’s Head. Why only head, I
don’t know; for the Dolphin’s effigy at full length, and upside
down – as a Dolphin is always bound to be when artistically
treated, though I suppose he is sometimes right side upward in his
natural condition – graced the sign-board. The sign-board chafed
its rusty hooks outside the bow-window of my room, and was a shabby