By profession he was an expert bookkeeper, in the employ of a firm doing a large bond and stock brokerage business on the sinful or Manhattan shore of the East River. The tragedy and the comedy, the sordid romance and the petty pathos of Wall Street rolled in an unheeded torrent over his head as he, submerged deep in the pages of his ledgers, sat all day long dotting his _i_'s and crossing his _t_'s, adding his columns and finding his totals. Sometimes of evenings he stayed on to do special accounting jobs for smaller concerns in need of his professional services. Otherwise, when five o'clock came he took off his little green-baize apron, his green eyeshade and his black calico sleeve protectors, slipped on his detachable cuffs, his hat and his coat, took his umbrella in hand, and leaving New York and its wicked, wanton ways behind him, he joined with half a million other struggling human molecules in the evening bridge crush--that same bridge crush of which the metropolis is so justly ashamed and so properly proud--and was presently at home in Brooklyn, which is a peaceful country landscape, pastoral in all its instincts, but grown up quite thickly with brick and mortar. There he gave his evenings to the society of his wife, to the chess problems printed from time to time in the _Eagle_, and to reading his encyclopedia, which had been purchased on the instalment plan, at the rate of so much down, so much a week. It seemed probable that Mr. Pilkins would finish reading his encyclopedia before he finished paying for it, which is more than most of us can say, however literary our aims and aspirations. He liked to pick up a volume for half an hour or so immediately prior to his retiring. He said it rested him. He had got as far as the middle of the very interesting one named _Gib to Jibe_. Once in a while, though, the Pilkinses went out in society. That is to say, Mrs. Pilkins went, and took Mr. Pilkins with her. I would not have you believe from all this that Mr. Pilkins entertained no views of his own on current topics. His convictions upon certain heads were most definite and settled, and on favourable occasions openly he voiced them. Among other things he believed that if somebody would only start up an old-time minstrel show, such as we used to see when we were boys, it would make a fortune; that the newspapers printed a pack of lies every day because they had to have something to fill up their columns; that there was a great deal of grafting going on and something should be done about it right away; that the winters were changing, because of the Gulf Stream or something, so you couldn't depend on the climate any more; that owing to the high cost of living it was practically impossible to get a good sixty-cent table-d'hôte dinner nowadays; and that Mrs. Pilkins was in many respects a very unusual woman.