This was the theory of the office, as Henry once heard it expressed,
with a cynicism more brief and direct from the lips of one of his
task-masters; but it must be admitted that in certain respects his
experience was extreme. There are offices which are the ears and eyes of
activities absorbingly and even romantically human. To be in a
shipping-office is not perhaps to be the rose, but it is to live near
it,--the great rose of the sea. You are, so to say, a land-sailor, a
supercargo left on shore. Your office-windows are lashed with
hurricanes; your talk is frequently of cyclones. The names of far
romantic isles are constantly on your lips, and your bills of lading are
threepenny romances in themselves. Strange produce of distant lands are
your daily concern, and the four winds meet at your counter with a
savour of tar. For all you know, a pirate may claim your attention any
minute of the day.

Or, again, to be, say, in a corn-merchant's, a clearing-house of the
fruitful earth. There at your telephone you may hear the corn-fields
whispering to you, hear the wheat waving in the wind, and the thin
chatter of oats. Or you may sell butter and cheese in an office that
smells of farms. However removed, you are an indirect agent of the
earth, a humble go-between of the seasons and the eternal needs of man.

Or, once more, you may be one of the thousand clerks of a great
manufacturer, and be humbly related to one of the arts or crafts that
gladden the eye or add to the comforts of man. Or even, though you may
be denied so close an association with the elements, or the arts, you
may be the pen to some subtle legal confidante of human nature. Your
office may be stored with records of human perversity and whimsicality.
You may be the witness to fantastic wills, or assist in the