Also to Ceylon, specially for elephants' tusks."

"You will want a good many ships," said I.

"A perfect fleet," said he.

Quite overpowered by the magnificence of these transactions, I

asked him where the ships he insured mostly traded to at present?

"I haven't begun insuring yet," he replied. "I am looking about

me."

Somehow, that pursuit seemed more in keeping with Barnard's Inn. I

said (in a tone of conviction), "Ah-h!"

"Yes. I am in a counting-house, and looking about me."

"Is a counting-house profitable?" I asked.

"To - do you mean to the young fellow who's in it?" he asked, in

reply.

"Yes; to you."

"Why, n-no: not to me." He said this with the air of one carefully

reckoning up and striking a balance. "Not directly profitable. That

is, it doesn't pay me anything, and I have to - keep myself."

This certainly had not a profitable appearance, and I shook my head

as if I would imply that it would be difficult to lay by much

accumulative capital from such a source of income.

"But the thing is," said Herbert Pocket, "that you look about you.

That's the grand thing. You are in a counting-house, you know, and

you look about you."

It struck me as a singular implication that you couldn't be out of

a counting-house, you know, and look about you; but I silently

deferred to his experience.

"Then the time comes," said Herbert, "when you see your opening.

And you go in, and you swoop upon it and you make your capital, and

then there you are! When you have once made your capital, you have

nothing to do but employ it."

This was very like his way of conducting that encounter in the

garden; very like. His manner of bearing his poverty, too, exactly

corresponded to his manner of bearing that defeat. It seemed to me

that he took all blows and buffets now, with just the same air as

he had taken mine then. It was evident that he had nothing around

him but the simplest necessaries, for everything that I remarked

upon turned out to have been sent in on my account from the

coffee-house or somewhere else.

Yet, having already made his fortune in his own mind, he was so

unassuming with it that I felt quite grateful to him for not being

puffed up. It was a pleasant addition to his naturally pleasant

ways, and we got on famously. In the evening we went out for a walk

in the streets, and went half-price to the Theatre; and next day we

went to church at Westminster Abbey, and in the afternoon we walked

in the Parks; and I wondered who shod all the horses there, and

wished Joe did.

On a moderate computation, it was many months, that Sunday, since I

had left Joe and Biddy. The space interposed between myself and

them, partook of that expansion, and our marshes were any distance

off. That I could have been at our old church in my old

church-going clothes, on the very last Sunday that ever was, seemed

a combination of impossibilities, geographical and social, solar

and lunar. Yet in the London streets, so crowded with people and so

brilliantly lighted in the dusk of evening, there were depressing

hints of reproaches for that I had put the poor old kitchen at home

so far away; and in the dead of night, the footsteps of some

incapable impostor of a porter mooning about Barnard's Inn, under

pretence of watching it, fell hollow on my heart.

On the Monday morning at a quarter before nine, Herbert went to the

counting-house to report himself - to look about him, too, I

suppose - and I bore him company. He was to come away in an hour or

two to attend me to Hammersmith, and I was to wait about for him.

It appeared to me that the eggs from which young Insurers were

hatched, were incubated in dust and heat, like the eggs of

ostriches, judging from the places to which those incipient giants

repaired on a Monday morning. Nor did the counting-house where

Herbert assisted, show in my eyes as at all a good Observatory;

being a back second floor up a yard, of a grimy presence in all

particulars, and with a look into another back second floor, rather

than a look out.