Without remarking that man-traps were not among the amenities of life, I

said I supposed he was very skilful?

"Deep," said Wemmick, "as Australia." Pointing with his pen at the

office floor, to express that Australia was understood, for the purposes

of the figure, to be symmetrically on the opposite spot of the globe.

"If there was anything deeper," added Wemmick, bringing his pen to

paper, "he'd be it."

Then, I said I supposed he had a fine business, and Wemmick said,

"Ca-pi-tal!" Then I asked if there were many clerks? to which he

replied,-"We don't run much into clerks, because there's only one Jaggers, and

people won't have him at second hand. There are only four of us. Would

you like to see 'em? You are one of us, as I may say."

I accepted the offer. When Mr. Wemmick had put all the biscuit into the

post, and had paid me my money from a cash-box in a safe, the key

of which safe he kept somewhere down his back and produced from his

coat-collar like an iron-pigtail, we went up stairs. The house was dark

and shabby, and the greasy shoulders that had left their mark in Mr.

Jaggers's room seemed to have been shuffling up and down the staircase

for years. In the front first floor, a clerk who looked something

between a publican and a rat-catcher--a large pale, puffed, swollen

man--was attentively engaged with three or four people of shabby

appearance, whom he treated as unceremoniously as everybody seemed to

be treated who contributed to Mr. Jaggers's coffers. "Getting evidence

together," said Mr. Wemmick, as we came out, "for the Bailey." In the

room over that, a little flabby terrier of a clerk with dangling hair

(his cropping seemed to have been forgotten when he was a puppy) was

similarly engaged with a man with weak eyes, whom Mr. Wemmick presented

to me as a smelter who kept his pot always boiling, and who would melt

me anything I pleased,--and who was in an excessive white-perspiration,

as if he had been trying his art on himself. In a back room, a

high-shouldered man with a face-ache tied up in dirty flannel, who was

dressed in old black clothes that bore the appearance of having been

waxed, was stooping over his work of making fair copies of the notes of

the other two gentlemen, for Mr. Jaggers's own use.

This was all the establishment. When we went down stairs again, Wemmick

led me into my guardian's room, and said, "This you've seen already."




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