Fifty years of London life Author:Edmund Hodgson Yates Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: perhaps—" " Yes, yes, my good fellow; no doubt you think they're very important; I call them d d twopenny-ha'penny! Now read, my good fellow, read!" Thus adjured... more », the clerk would commence reading aloud one of his documents. The colonel, still half engaged with his private correspondence, would hear enough to make him keep up a running commentary of disparaging grunts: " Pooh ! stuff ! upon my soul!" etc. Then the clerk, having come to the end of the manuscript, would stop, waiting for orders; and there would ensue a dead silence, broken by the colonel, who, having finished his private letters, would look up and say, " Well, my good fellow, well?" "That's all, sir." "And quite enough too. Go on to the next!" " But what shall I say to this applicant, sir ?" " Say to him ? Tell him to go and be d d, my good fellow!" and on our own reading of those instructions we had very frequently to act. With all this, Colonel Maberly was a clear-headed man of business ; old-fashioned, inclined to let matters run in their ordinary groove, detesting all projects of reform, and having an abiding horror of Rowland Hill. As I have said, he was with me generally easily good-natured, but he could assume an air of hauteur and be uncommonly unpleasant sometimes; and I remember that when on a little slip of written memoranda which used to be kept on the edge of his green slope-desk we saw the words, "Kate—money," we might generally expect to find the colonel's temper rather short that morning. Among those clerks who were not brought much into communication with him he was supposed to be very high and haughty, and in connection with this trait there was a good story told of him shortly after I joined the service. It appears that one of Lord Clanricarde's recent appointments, a strapping Irish la...« less