CHAPTER IX.
A PENITENTIARY OF THE MATHEMATICS Yes, Mike was some day to be another Kean, and Henry was to prove a serious rival to Shakespeare; but, meanwhile, they were clerks in the offices of Tyre.
Of the rigours, and therefore too the truancies and humours of the lot official, Mike was comparatively so comfortably circumstanced as to have little knowledge.

His father was the king of a little flourishing prison of desks, and Mike was one of the heirs-apparent.

Consequently, his lot, though dull, was seldom bitter; and many mitigations of it were within his privilege.

With Henry it was different.

He was a humble unit among twenty other slaves, chained to that modern substitute for the galleys, the desk; and, in a wicked bargain, he had contracted to give his life-blood from nine in the morning till six in the evening, for sixty pounds a year, with an occasional "rise," which, after thirty years' service, might end in your having reached a proud annual three hundred for the rest of your maimed and narrowed days.
Henry had come to the office straight from school, at the age of sixteen; and, though classrooms breathe an air sufficiently frigid and suggestive of inhuman interests and unmeaning discipline, the icy air of that office had at first almost taken his breath.