Sera tamen respexit
Libertas. -- Virgil.
A Clerk I was in London gay.
-- OKEEFE.
IF peradventure, Reader, it has been thy lot to waste the golden years of thy life -- thy shining youth -- in the irksome fi of an office; to have thy prison days prolohrough middle age down to decrepitude and silver hairs, without hope of release or respite; to have lived tet that there are such things as holidays, or to remember them but as the prerogatives of childhood; then, and then only, will you be able to appreciate my deliverance.
It is now six and thirty years siook my seat at the desk in Ming-lane. Melancholy was the transition at fourteen from the abundant play-time, and the frequently-intervening vacations of school days, to the eight, nine, and sometimes ten hours a-day attenda a ting-house. But time partially reciles us to anything. I gradually became tent -- doggedly tented, as wild animals in cages.
It is true I had my Sundays to myself; but Sundays, admirable as the institution of them is for purposes of worship, are for that very reason the very worst adapted for days of unbending and recreation. In particular, there is a gloom for me attendant upon a city Sunday, a weight in the air. I miss the cheerful cries of London, the musid the ballad-singers -- the buzz and stirring murmur of the streets. Those eternal bells depress me. The closed shops repel me. Prints, pictures, all the glittering and endless succession of knacks and gewgaws, and ostentatiously displayed wares of tradesmen, which make a week-day sauhrough the less busy parts of the metropolis so delightful -- are shut out. No book-stalls deliciously to idle over -- No busy faces to recreate the idle man who plates them ever passing by -- the very face of business a charm by trast to his temporary relaxation from it. Nothing to be seen but unhappy tenances -- or half-happy at best -- of emancipated `prentices and little tradesfolks, with here and there a servant maid that has got leave to go out, who, slaving all the week, with the habit has lost almost the capacity of enjoying a free hour; and livelily expressing the hollowness of a days pleasuring. The very strollers in the fields on that day look anything but fortable.
But besides Sundays I had a day at Easter, and a day at Christmas, with a full week in the summer to go and air myself in my native fields of Hertfordshire. This last was a great indulgence; and the prospect of its recurrence, I believe, alo me up through the year, and made my duraolerable. But when the week came round, did the glittering phantom of the distance keep touch with me? or rather was it not a series of seven uneasy days, spent iless pursuit of pleasure, and a wearisome ao find out how to make the most of them? Where was the quiet, where the promised rest? Before I had a taste of it, it was vanished. I was at the desk again, ting upon the fifty-oedious weeks that must intervene before suother snatch would e. Still the prospect of its ing threw something of an illumination upon the darker side of my captivity. Without it, as I have said, I could scarcely have sustained my thraldom.
Indepely of the rigours of attendance, I have ever been haunted with a sense (perhaps a mere caprice) of incapacity for business. This, during my latter years, had increased to such a degree, that it was visible in the lines of my tenance. My health and my good spirits flagged. I had perpetually a dread of some crisis, to w