I returned calmly to my department and wrapped myself in silence as with a garment. But I concealed a bruised heart, as the saying is, and determined to rectify this unpleasant event as swiftly as possible. I decided to stop after hours for six consecutive nights and write till eight, or even nine o’clock, and so produce an amount of work during the current account that should delight Mr. Westonshaugh and gratify Mr. Trott, if he ever heard about it. I wanted, before everything, to show them I bore no malice, but quite the contrary. Mr. Blades thought my idea good, and that very night I stopped on and on, long after the staff had gone. It was a weird and interesting thing to be alone with my solitary gaslight in that huge and empty office. All was profound silence, save where my industrious pen steadily registered policy after policy. Here and there out of the darkness glimmered a knob of brass or some such thing, like the watchful eye of a beast of prey, and far below one heard the occasional, eerie rattle of a hansom, or cry of a human voice in the empty City. In all that huge hive of industry only I appeared to be humming! It was a great thought in its way. And yet I felt the presence of my colleagues in a ghostly sort of fashion, and knew where the warlike Bassett sat, and the musical Wardle, and the sporting Tomlinson, and so on. But, of course, they were all far away in the bosoms of their families, or elsewhere, as the case might be. And then came a strange experience—the event of a lifetime, or, at any rate, the event of mine so far, for suddenly and without anything much in the way of premonitory symptoms, I got an urgent craving to write a poem! It is impossible to say how it came, or why; but there it was. My fatal experiences of that day, and being so sorry for myself, and one thing and another, depressed me to a most unusual flatness; and then nature, apparently rebelling against this flatness, urged me to write a poem upon a dire and fearful subject.