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Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland by Joseph Tatlow
page 32 of 272 (11%)
modest income for a time the young couple lived. It was a runaway match;
on the girl's part an elopement from school. They lived in apartments,
kept by an old lady, a widow who, being a woman, loved a bit of romance,
and was very kind to them. He was a manly young fellow, a sportsman and
renowned at cricket, and she was amiable and pretty, a little blonde
beauty. The parents were well to do, and in due time forgave the
imprudent match. At this we all rejoiced for he was a general favourite.

Looking back now it seems to me the office staff was in some ways a
curious collection and very different to the clerks of to-day. Many of
them had not entered railway life until nearly middle-age and they had
not assimilated as an office staff does now, when all join as youths and
are brought up together. They were original, individual, not to say
eccentric. Whilst our office included certain steady married clerks, who
worked hard and lived ordinary middle-class respectable lives, and some
few bachelors of quiet habit, the rest were a lively set indeed, by no
means free from inclinations to coarse conviviality and many of them
spendthrift, reckless and devil-may-care. At pay-day, which occurred
monthly, most of these merry wights, after receiving their pay, betook
themselves to the _Midland Tap_ or other licensed house and there
indulged, for the remainder of the afternoon, in abundant beer, pouring
down glass after glass; in Charles Lamb's inimitable words: "the second
to see where the first has gone, the third to see no harm happens to the
second, a fourth to say there is another coming, and a fifth to say he is
not sure he is the last." Some of the merriest of them would not return
to the office that day but extend their carouse far into the night; to
sadly realise next day that it was "the morning after the night before."

I do not think our ladylike chief clerk ever indulged in these orgies,
but I never knew more than the mildest remonstrance being made by him or
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