“Look here,” said his mentor truculently; “if you say ‘sir’ to me again I shall smack your head, and I shall smack it hard. This is the third time to-day I have warned you. Pull yourself together. You are not now with your Aunt Priscilla at Beaconsfield Villa, Hither Green. You are in the counting-house of Crumpett and Hawker, my son, and the sooner you understand that the better it will be for everybody. I shall not show you how to tie a double knot any more. The next time I shall put my hand round your ear; and it will hurt. If I had not been the best-hearted chap that ever swaggered round the second circle at the Empire on a Saturday night, you would have got the boot this very afternoon. Pa wanted to report you to Octavius. But I stood firm. ‘No, Father,’ I said, ‘the youth is off his filbert, but so was Blair Athol when he won the Derby.’ There, over goes the paste! Don’t stand gazing at it, you lunatic, but get some back numbers of _The Athenæum_ and mop it up.” XIX It is not to be surmised that William Jordan, Junior, was in any sense _persona gratissima_ in the distinguished society in which he was called upon to move between the hours of eight and seven. In the eyes of Mr. James Dodson, who, apparently, had annexed the entire zone of practical wisdom as his province--at least, his range of lore was amazing, his tactics on all occasions, in the office and out of it, were masterly in the extreme, while his consummate address and fertility of resource had long been the despair of all who had been admitted to the honour of his intercourse--in the eyes of this considerable scholar in the stern school of experience, William Jordan, Junior, was no more than an object of contemptuous compassion. At the hands of this austere master of “hard-shell” practicality he was the daily recipient of much profound advice which probed the depths of human wisdom, tempered by more or less severe personal chastisement to help him to assimilate it. “They say Nature gives one talent to every cove gratis,” Mr. Dodson would say as he proceeded thoughtfully to administer reproof and correction, “but this talent of yours takes a deal of finding, my son.” During the first weeks of the boy’s servitude he had much to endure. After the first flush of his triumph had faded, and it burnt itself out almost as soon as it was born, there was nothing but dogged patience and continual prayer to sustain him in the course of life which had been marked out as his own. All too soon the exaltation that attended the triumph over the apparently insurmountable was succeeded by a profound dejection. A new and very poignant terror was added to an existence which, from its first hour, had been over-freighted with suffering.