How eager these people seemed hastening to their daily toil! They looked chiefly of the clerk class. What a dreadful thing it must be to live all the daylight of one's life over a desk! Never to see wooded valley or corn-plains! These men had less than three pounds a-week, and had to dress decently. Most of them were married men with families. How did they live? What pleasure could they take in their lives? Daily they rose at seven, ate breakfast, and hurried into the warehouses. There they drew laboured breath over dreary desks hour after hour, until the warehouse closed. There were hundreds of thousands of such men now in the City, or speeding towards it. And what was all this dull routine for? Merely that they might live. Nothing more. There was before ninety-nine out of a hundred clerks no chance of promotion. Here they were rushing by hundreds of battalions into their pent-up offices, merely that they might live another week. What object could life be to them? Why should they submit to such a lot for the mere privilege of drawing breath a few more hours, when there was no room for speculation in these hours? When there was an absolute certainty of future days being exact counterparts of past ones. It was humiliating to think of man, who was destined to rule the earth while upon it, and hereafter to-- 'Ugh! that terrible thought again. What, could it be all things should come to nothingness? All things? All people? Philosophers had held life a comedy or a tragedy. Here, if there was anything in what had lately reached him, life was a farce, a hideous hollow farce. A wicked cruel farce. A farce for whose enjoyment? No. It can't be a farce played by man for his own amusement; for man is not aware it is a farce, and if he was it would only drive him to desperation. 'And yet the facts are so cogent, the reasoning is so close. I can make nothing of it. Nothing. Is the individuality of man nothing? Are my mother and my sisters, who are self-conscious and sympathetic now, endowed with beautiful spirits and ample faith, are they nothing but what we can see and feel and hear? Is man merely a machine for the carriage and use of five senses? Monstrous!' He put the thought away and occupied himself with the things around him.