The great first day at the Apollo Fire Office soon came, and my Aunt Augusta seemed to be quite moved as, having discussed two poached eggs, a roll, butter, toast, and marmalade, and two cups of coffee, I went forth in my top-hat and tail-coat to earn my living. Women are rum. She’d worked like anything to get me this great appointment, and yet, when I started off in the best possible style to begin, Aunt Augusta seemed distinctly sniffy! I took an omnibus from Oxford Street, having previously walked down Harley Street, which is a great haunt of the medical profession. Merely to walk down it and read the names is a solemn thing to do, and makes you thank God for being pretty well. In due course I arrived at my destination, in Threadneedle Street in the very heart of the City of London. First you come to the Bank of England—an imposing edifice quite black with centuries of London fog—and opposite this is the Royal Exchange, whose weather-vane is a grasshopper covered with gold and of enormous size. Often and often, from the Country Department of the Apollo I used to look up at it and long to be in the green places where real grasshoppers occur so freely. But, to return, I walked into the Apollo, which comes next to the Bank of England, and found there was a book on the first floor of the office, in which every member of the staff had to sign his name on arriving. When the hour of ten struck, a clerk came forward, dipped his pen into the red ink, picked up a ruler and drew a line across the page. This was to separate the clerks who were in time from those who were late. If you were under the red line more than once or twice in a month, you heard about it unfavourably. There was an amazing record of a wonderful old clerk who had worked in the office for forty-five years and never once been under the line! But at last there came a day when the hour of ten rang out and the old clerk had not come. Everybody was very excited over it, and they actually gave him ten minutes’ grace, which was not lawful, but a sporting and a proper thing to do in my opinion. However, all was without avail; for he did not come, and the red line had to be reluctantly drawn. Everybody almost trembled to know what the old clerk would do when he arrived to find the record of forty-five years was ended; but the old clerk never did arrive, because a telegram came, a few minutes after the drawing of the line, to say that he had died in his sleep at his wife’s side, and therefore could not get up at six o’clock, which was his rule. It was rather sad in a way.