And this of all the professions is the one on which he would graft his scion of lofty morality? Surely, there be plenty of fuel for a conflagration in a lawyer’s office. Such rows of half-calf tomes, such piles of legal documents, all designed to combat dishonesty and fraud, “and all immersed in them, and nourished and maintained by them.” In what a sorry condition will your Morality issue out of these bogs! A lawyer’s clerk, we are informed, can not maintain his hold on his clerkship, if he does not learn to blink. That is why Khalid is not long in serving papers, copying summonses, and searching title-deeds. In this lawyer’s office he develops traits altogether foreign to his nature. He even becomes a quidnunc, prying now and then into the personal affairs of his superiors. Ay, and he dares once to suggest to his employer a new method of dealing with the criminals among his clients. Withal, Khalid is slow, slower than the law itself. If he goes out to serve a summons he does not return for a day. If he is sent to search title-deeds, he does not show up in the office for a week. And often he would lose himself in the Park surrounding the Register’s Office, pondering on his theory of immanent morality. He would sit down on one of those benches, which are the anchors of loafers of another type, his batch of papers beside him, and watch the mad crowds coming and going, running, as it were, between two fires. These puckered people are the living, moving chambers of sleeping souls.
Khalid was always glad to come to this Register’s Office. For though the searching of title-deeds be a mortal process, the loafing margin of the working hour could be extended imperceptibly, and without hazarding his or his employer’s interest. The following piece of speculative fantasy and insight must have been thought out when he should have been searching title-deeds.
“This Register’s Office,” it is written in the K.L. MS. , “is the very bulwark of Society. It is the foundation on which the Trust Companies,