by anyone in authority.

Pay-day was also the time for squaring accounts. "The human species,"
Charles Lamb says, "is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow
and the men who lend." This was true of our office, but no equal
division prevailed as the borrowers predominated and the lenders, the
prudent, were a small minority. A general settlement took place monthly,
after which a new period began--by the borrowers with joyous unconcern.
"Take no thought for the morrow" was a maxim dear to the heart of these
knights of the pen.

Swearing, as I have said, was not considered low or vulgar or unbecoming
a gentleman. There was a senior clerk of some standing and position, a
married man of thirty-five or forty years of age, who gloried in it. His
expletives were varied, vivid and inexhaustible, and the turbid stream
was easily set flowing. Had he lived a century earlier he might have
been put in the stocks for his profanity, a punishment which magistrates
were then, by Act of Parliament, empowered to inflict. He was a strange
individual. _Long Jack_ he was called. He is not in this world now so I
may write of him with freedom.

No one's enemy but his own, he was kindly, good-natured, generous to a
fault, but devil-may-care and reckless; and, at any one's expense, or at
any cost to himself, would have his fling and his joke.

It was from his lankiness and length of limb that he was called "_Long
Jack_." He stood about six feet six in his boots. He must have had
means of his own, as he lived in a way far beyond the reach of even a
senior clerk of the first degree. How he came to be in a railway office,
or, being in, retained his place, was a matter of wonder. Sad to tell,