'Uncommon sense?' suggested Daniel, with his quiet smile.

'You may call it so, if you like--and each of you will be a right hand

to the other. Here's my own right hand upon it, as a practical man, to

both of you.' The purchase was completed within a month. It left Arthur in possession

of private personal means not exceeding a few hundred pounds; but it

opened to him an active and promising career. The three friends dined

together on the auspicious occasion; the factory and the factory wives

and children made holiday and dined too; even Bleeding Heart Yard

dined and was full of meat.

Two months had barely gone by in all, when

Bleeding Heart Yard had become so familiar with short-commons again,

that the treat was forgotten there; when nothing seemed new in the

partnership but the paint of the inscription on the door-posts, DOYCE

AND CLENNAM; when it appeared even to Clennam himself, that he had had

the affairs of the firm in his mind for years.

The little counting-house reserved for his own occupation, was a room of

wood and glass at the end of a long low workshop, filled with benches,

and vices, and tools, and straps, and wheels; which, when they were

in gear with the steam-engine, went tearing round as though they had a

suicidal mission to grind the business to dust and tear the factory to

pieces. A communication of great trap-doors in the floor and roof with

the workshop above and the workshop below, made a shaft of light in

this perspective, which brought to Clennam's mind the child's old

picture-book, where similar rays were the witnesses of Abel's

murder.

The noises were sufficiently removed and shut out from the

counting-house to blend into a busy hum, interspersed with periodical

clinks and thumps. The patient figures at work were swarthy with the

filings of iron and steel that danced on every bench and bubbled up

through every chink in the planking. The workshop was arrived at by a

step-ladder from the outer yard below, where it served as a shelter for

the large grindstone where tools were sharpened. The whole had at once

a fanciful and practical air in Clennam's eyes, which was a welcome

change; and, as often as he raised them from his first work of getting

the array of business documents into perfect order, he glanced at these

things with a feeling of pleasure in his pursuit that was new to him.

Raising his eyes thus one day, he was surprised to see a bonnet

labouring up the step-ladder. The unusual apparition was followed by

another bonnet. He then perceived that the first bonnet was on the head

of Mr F.'s Aunt, and that the second bonnet was on the head of Flora,

who seemed to have propelled her legacy up the steep ascent with

considerable difficulty. Though not altogether enraptured at the sight

of these visitors, Clennam lost no time in opening the counting-house

door, and extricating them from the workshop; a rescue which was

rendered the more necessary by Mr F.'s Aunt already stumbling over some

impediment, and menacing steam power as an Institution with a stony

reticule she carried.




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