Mr. Mitchell occupied five rooms lined with law books and musty with the smell of leather. These rooms ranged end to end, each with a door that opened upon a dark hallway; a waiting-room in front, the private office at the rear, to which no client was ever admitted directly. Depressed by delay, subdued by an overflow of thick volumes, when he reaches a suitable dejection he is tip-toed through dismal antechambers of wisdom, appalled by tall bookstacks, ushered into the leather-chaired office, and there further crushed by long shelves of dingy tin boxes, each box crowded with weighty secrets and shelved papers of fabulous moment and urgency; the least paper of the smallest box more important--the unfortunate client is clear on that point--than any contemptible need of his own. Cowed and chastened, he is now ready to pay a fee suitable to the mind that has absorbed all the wisdom of those many bookshelves; or meekly to accept as justice any absurdity or monstrosity of the law. Mr. Mitchell was greeted by a slim, swarthy, black-eyed, elderly person of twenty-five or thirty, with a crooked nose and a crooked mind, half clerk and half familiar spirit--Mr. Joseph Pelman, to wit; who appeared perpetually on the point of choking himself by suppressed chucklings at his principal's cleverness and the simplicity of dupes. "Well, Joe?" "Two to see you, sir," said Joe, his face lit up with sprightly malice. "On the same lay. That Watkins farm of yours. I got it out of 'em. Ho ho! I kept 'em in different rooms. I hunted up their records in your record books. Doomsday Books, I call 'em. Ho ho!" Mr. Mitchell selected a cigar, lit it, puffed it, and fixed his eye on his demon clerk. "Now then," he said sharply, "let's have it!" The demon pounced on a Brobdingnagian volume upon the desk and worried it open at a marker. It had been meant for a ledger, that huge volume; the gray cloth covers bore the legend "N to Z." Ledger it was, of a grim sort, with sinister entries of forgotten sins, the itemized strength or weakness of a thousand men. The confidential clerk ran a long, confidential finger along the spidery copperplate index of the W's: "Wakelin, Walcott, Walker, Wallace, Walsh, Walters; Earl, John, Peter, Ray, Rex, Roy--Samuel--page 1124." His nimble hands flew at the pages like a dog at a woodchuck hole. "Here't is--'Walters, Samuel: born '69, son of John Walters, Holland Hill; religion--politics--um-um--bad habits, none; two years Vesper Academy; three years Dennison shoe factories; married 1896--one child, b. 1899. Bought Travis Farm 1898, paying half down; paid balance out in five years; dairy, fifteen cows; forehanded, thrifty. Humph! Good pay, I guess." He cocked his head to one side and eyed his employer, fingering a wisp of black silk on his upper lip. "And the other?" The second volume was spread open upon the desk. Clerk Pelman flung himself upon it with savage fury.