At last, I succeeded in obtaining some clerical employment. For no
other work was I fit, for my training had not been special in any one
direction. My hours were long, from ten in the morning till seven in
the evening, and as I was three miles distant from the office, I was
really away from home for eleven hours every day, excepting on
Sundays. I began to calculate that my life consisted of nothing but
the brief spaces allowed to me for rest, and these brief spaces I
could not enjoy because I dwelt upon their brevity. There was some
excuse for me. Never could there be any duty incumbent upon man much
more inhuman and devoid of interest than my own. How often I thought
about my friend Clark, and his experiences became mine. The whole
day I did nothing but write, and what I wrote called forth no single
faculty of the mind. Nobody who has not tried such an occupation can
possibly forecast the strange habits, humours, fancies, and diseases
which after a time it breeds. I was shut up in a room half below the
ground. In this room were three other men besides myself, two of
them between fifty and sixty, and one about three or four-and-twenty.
All four of us kept books or copied letters from ten to seven, with
an interval of three-quarters of an hour for dinner.
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