Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/88

 offered to every enterprising bread-seeker, chances so promising at the first glance, so barren and so full of rottenness when they came to be tested! Clerkships? Clerkships galore! legal, mercantile, general clerks were wanted everywhere, only apply to A. B. or Y. Z., and take them! But when A. B. or Y. Z. replied, Walter Joyce found that the legal clerks must write the regular engrossing hand, must sweep out the office ready for the other clerks by nine, and must remain there occasionally till nine , with a little outdoor work in the service of writs and notices of ejectment. The duties required of the mercantile clerk were but little better, and those of the general clerks were worst of all, while throughout a net income of eighteen shillings a week appeared to be the average remuneration. "A secretary wanted." Certainly, four secretaries wanted nearly every day, for public companies which were about to bring forth an article in universal demand, but of which the supply had hitherto been limited, and which could not fail to meet with an enormous success and return a large dividend. In all cases the secretary must be a man of education and of gentlemanly manners, so said the advertisements; but the reply to Walter Joyce's application, said in addition that he must be able to advance the sum of three hundred pounds, to be invested in the shares of the company, which would bear interest at the rate of twenty-five per cent per annum. The Press? Through the medium of their London fraternity the provincial press was clamorous for educated men who could write leading articles, general articles and reviews; but on inquiry the press required the same educated men to be able to combine shorthand reporting with editorial writing, and in many cases suggested the advisability of the editorial writer being able to set up his own leaders in type at case. The literary institutions throughout the country were languishing for lecturers, but when Walter Joyce wrote to them, offering them a choice of certain subjects which he had studied, and on which he thought himself competent of conveying real information, he received answers from the secretaries, that only men of name were paid by the institutions, but that the committee would be happy to set apart a night for him if he chose to lecture gratis, or that if he felt inclined to address the inhabitants of Knuckleborough on his own account, the charge for the great hall was three pounds, for the smaller hall thirty shillings a night, in both cases exclusive of gas, while the secretary, who kept the principal stationer's shop and library in the town, would be happy to become his agent, and sell his tickets at the usual charge of ten per cent. Four pounds a week, guaranteed! Not a bad income for a penniless man; to be earned, too, in the discharge of a light and gentlemanly occupation, to be acquired by the outlay of three shillings' worth of postage stamps. Walter Joyce sent the postage stamps, and received in return a lithographic circular, very dirty about the folded edges, instructing him in the easiest method of modelling wax flowers!

That was the final straw. On the receipt of that letter, and on the reading of it—he had taken it from the stately old looking-glass over the fire-place to the box where of late he usually sat—Walter Joyce gave a deep groan, and buried his face in his hands. A minute after he felt his hair slightly touched, and looking up saw old Jack Byrne bending over him.

"What ails ye, lad?" asked the old man, tenderly.

"Misery—despair—starvation!"

"I thought so!" said the old man calmly. Then taking a small battered flask from his breast and emptying its contents into a clean cup before him—"Here, drink this, and come outside. We can't talk here!"

Walter swallowed the contents of the cup, mechanically, and followed his new friend into the street.

" is positively starving, and this money will be the saving of her."

These words were spoken in the course of a conversation between my old friend Mr. John Irwin, retired civil-servant, and myself; both sitting on a fine September morning in a little summer-house, in the garden of our mutual friend the Rev. Henry Tyson, Rector of Northwick-Balham, in the county of Berkshire. The subject of our conversation had been a piece of very flagitious behaviour on the part of a wealthy retired tradesman, Harding by name, who lived in the neighbourhood. A sum of money, amounting to a hundred pounds, was owing by this man to a widow, living also close at hand, for work done by her husband, just before he died. The validity of the claim had been denied by Mr. Harding, and payment obstinately refused.

"I have made it all right, however," said my friend, with something approaching to a chuckle. "It happens that this Harding is to a certain extent in my power. The particulars of a transaction in which he was engaged some