Toppleton's Client; Or, A Spirit in Exile

r was it entirely easy for him to spend his one thousand pounds a month, with lodgings for his headquarters. This fact annoyed him

s and frontier manners"-by which I presume he meant the diamond studded individuals who travel on Cook's Tickets, and whose so-called Americanism is based on the notion that Britons are still weeping over the

nfided his belief that luxurious ease was hard on the constitution. "Then you

ry it on next summer. I do not feel this year, however, that I ough

ith a laugh. "Responsibilities! Why, man, you

s, but I'll be hanged if I can find anything suitable. Your barristers over here have not as good accommodations as we give obsolete papers at home. Our pigeon-holes are palatial in compar

s friend. "You are not called upon to attend to any business here. A post

but where am I to keep my law library? And wh

don't count your clients before they

Do you suppose I want to be reminded at every step I take that I am a lawyer? Must my business be rammed down my throat at all hours? Am I never to have relaxation from office cares? Indeed, I'll not have a suggestion of law within a mile of my lodging

ffice at Newgate you might do more business than if

d better compromise and take an office out near the Tower," said Hopkins. "The location is quite desirable from my point of view. It would be so in

you simply forget that you are no longer in America but in England. Here a man needs an excuse for going to work. Trade is looked down upon. It is the butterfly we esteem, not the grub. A man who will work when he doesn't need to work, is looked upon with distrust. Society doesn't cultivate him, and the million regard him with suspicion,-and the position of both is distinctly logical. He who serves is a servant, and soci

iddle classes so dearly love the lords and dukes and other noble born creatures Nature has set above them. It is the generous self-denial of the aristocracy in the matter of work, and the consequent diminution of competition, that is the basis of that love. I'll do as you say, and see what I can d

nged his law library, consisting of the "Comic Blackstone," "Bench and Bar," by Sergeant Ballantyne, the "Newgate Calendar," and an absolute first of "Parsons on Contracts," on the mahogany shelves he had had constructed there; hung out a shingle

f years. Tenants had come but had as quickly gone. There was something about the room that no one seemed able to cope with. Luxuriously furnished or bare, it made no difference in the fortunes of Number 17, from the doors of which now projected the sign of Toppleton, Morley, Harkins, Perkins, Mawson, Bronson, Smithers, and Hicks. Just what the trouble was, the agent had

tery connected with the room. There has been a murder, or a suicide, or some

crime divulged by the books, was thirty-three years back when an occupant departed without paying his rent, bu

r, "I am sure there is nothing in the terms of the lease which binds me to keep tenants in a natural and cheerful frame of mind

cy left for precisely the same reason, that the office at times is suffocatingly weird; and that undefined whispers are to be heard

ral order in that room, and if you want to go to law with a case based on a Welsh rarebit diet, just do it. If the courts decide that I

the agent's eyes, were invariably sane enough not to carry the matter to the courts, where it was hardly possible that a plaintiff coul

tenants of Number 17, without exception, wisely resolved to suffer in silence, invariably leaving the room, how

ection with their wine cellars," said the agent to himself with a sad chuckle, which showed that

anything really was the matter with the office, partly by a desire to relieve the building of the odium unde

quality of the atmosphere clogged up his lungs and set his heart beating at a galloping pace; he, too, decided that so far as he was concerned life in that office was intolerable, and he acted ac

building, he felt that it was his duty to hold his peace. Toppleton had been informed that the room was useful chiefly for storage purposes, and if he chose to use it as an office, it was his own affair. In addition to this, the agent had a vague hope that Hopkins, being an American and used to all sorts of horrible things in his native land-such as boa-constrictors on the streets, buffaloes in the back yard, and Indians swarmin

gn that Hopkins had discovered anything wrong with the office, and even then the agent thought nothing about it until the placard began to accumulate dust. Then he shook his head and silently congratulated himself that the rent had been paid a year in advance; "f

to the soughing of the wind in the trees outside of his window, which was indeed an error, as he might have discovered at the time had he taken the trou