“There is also another dead certainty, my son,” said Mr. Dodson, “and that is that William Jordan, Junior, will never rise in this world, whatever he may do in the next.” However, upon the following morning, during the luncheon hour, this drastic opinion underwent a modification as serious as it was unexpected. It occurred in the following manner. Of late the boy had refrained from going forth to seek his luncheon in public places, being content with a few pieces of bread-and-butter which he brought from home in his pocket, and with a glass of water which he obtained on the premises. From this method of procedure, although it exposed him to the scorn of Mr. Dodson, and others eminent in the world, he derived several advantages. Foremost, and beyond all things, he was spared actual contact with the ever-surging crowd of street-persons, and from the necessity of plucking, as it were, his food from the cannon’s mouth of shops and restaurants, a feat which, if attempted by himself, invariably ended in total failure and annihilation; and if undertaken in the company of Mr. Dodson, as it sometimes was by an act of condescension on the part of that gentleman, was apt to prove expensive. Again, it enabled him to bestow more time on his duties, which seemed to demand so much; while again, so far had he been initiated already into the meaning of “what two and two made”--in the phrase of Mr. Dodson--that he divined that the less he went out to luncheon the more pieces of silver would there be for the service of the little room in the grave hour which he felt that Fate was so inexorably devising. Further, it happened in the days subsequent to his first entrancing insight into what he called “the Book of the Ages,” he occasionally took the courage to carry in his pocket a small volume of the ancient authors, that he might receive sustenance in the thrice-blessed hour between one and two, when he was left to his own devices in the counting-house of Crumpett and Hawker. It was this habit that so unexpectedly shattered the faith of the eminent worldling in whose charge he still was. It befell that he was immersed in a small black, time-stained, musty-smelling volume, with his hands over his ears, as he sat on his high stool, and his eyes pressed close to the page, when all of a sudden, he received a smart blow on the cheek which made him start with surprise and wince with pain.