When one gets the trick of the legal jargon, it's not easy to draw the simplest form of agreement without a few superfluous words.

I may as well call in my clerk to witness our signatures, I suppose." "Call in any one you like." The clerk was summoned from a sunless and airless den at the back of his principal's office.

The two men appended their signatures to the document; the clerk added his in witness of the genuine nature of those signatures.

It was an affair of two minutes.

The clerk was dismissed.
Mr.Sheldon blotted and folded the memorandum, and laid it aside in one of the drawers of his desk.
"Come," he said cheerily, "that's a business-like beginning at any rate.