All in a garden fair; the simple story of three boys ... - University Library

ALL L\ A GARDEN FAIR. 201
day and be ricli—but I don't know liow or
when. I don't think, so fiir as I know, that
there has ever been yet a City merchant wlio
was a poet—Eogers, to be sure ; but he was
only a banker. You shall be that phenomenon,
the first i^reat wealthy merchant who ever
wrote poems.'
Allen laughed. A City merchant he felt
very sure he should never be. Ilow long he
should have to continue a City clerk was
another question, for the irksomeness of the
Asork became every day more intolerable to
him, and the drudgery more aimless. I be-
lieve that there is no torture worse than that
of setting men to do work which means
nothing. In military prisons they used— per-
haps they do it still—to make the j)risoners
carry heavy shot from one place to another
place and then back again—a punishment
which presently brings on either softening of
the brain or an irrepressible desire to kill some
one. When one thinks of the City clerk—the
mechanical clerk—who copies and enters and