When Mr. Kinchenton was forty years old, his income had reached the bewildering amount of four hundred a year, and he thought he might indulge in the luxury of a wife; so he took to himself a pretty little soft-eyed girl, the daughter of an old gentleman who was a traveller, in the straw-bonnet line, and who, when he was not driving about in a very high four-wheeled trap which did its best to look like a mail-phaeton and signally failed in the attempt, lived in the little terrace next door to Kinchenton's lodgings. After his daughter's marriage, the old gentleman, who was a widower, gave up travelling, retired upon his savings, and went to live with his son-in-law in a little house which Kinchenton had taken in Camden Town, where the birth of a son crowned Kinchenton's happiness. His adoration of this child was his weakest point: he was always narrating its wonderful deeds to every body; and the men in the office, with whom the little fellow was really a favourite, knew they could always get late attendance overlooked or half-holiday granted if they asked after little Percy, and sent him some trifling present. It is well for the junior clerks of No. 120 that Mr. Kinchenton is the head of the room; for the next in seniority, Mr. Dibb, is by no means a pleasant person. Harsh, stiff, sectarian bigotry lurks in his coarse, close-cropped black hair, and in the plaited folds of his huge white neckcloth; he invariably wears a black dress coat, waistcoat, and trousers, creaking boots, and damp cloth gloves. He is always ailing, and invariably changing his medical system: now vaunting the virtues of blue-pill, now swearing by homoeopathy; he has been rubbed and cracked and shampooed and galvanised; and once he tried hydropathy, but came back in a week from Malvern no better, and apparently no cleaner, than before his visit to Dr. Gully. He was one of the first-fruits of the noble system of promotion by merit, having been transferred to Rutland House from some provincial stronghold of the Tin-Tax Office, and report said that he had originally been a schoolmaster in Bilston. He was hated by nearly all his juniors, but respected by the heads for his conscientiousness and power of work; and he was located in No. 120 to neutralise, to some extent, Mr. Kinchenton's excess of good nature. The rank and file of No. 120 consisted of Mr. Prescott and Mr. Pringle, junior clerks; Mr. Boppy, an old gentleman with a bald head and a double eyeglass, who had arrived, through dint of long service, at a good income, who was utterly useless, and who had no characteristic save his intense dread of his wife; and Mr. Crump, who had been for twenty years an extra clerk, and who, owing to an invincible stutter, had never been able to interest any one sufficiently to procure him an appointment.