A general settlement took place monthly,
after which a new period began--by the borrowers with joyous unconcern.
"Take no thought for the morrow" was a maxim dear to the heart of these
knights of the pen.
Swearing, as I have said, was not considered low or vulgar or unbecoming
a gentleman. There was a senior clerk of some standing and position, a
married man of thirty-five or forty years of age, who gloried in it. His
expletives were varied, vivid and inexhaustible, and the turbid stream
was easily set flowing. Had he lived a century earlier he might have
been put in the stocks for his profanity, a punishment which magistrates
were then, by Act of Parliament, empowered to inflict. He was a strange
individual. _Long Jack_ he was called. He is not in this world now so I
may write of him with freedom.
No one's enemy but his own, he was kindly, good-natured, generous to a
fault, but devil-may-care and reckless; and, at any one's expense, or at
any cost to himself, would have his fling and his joke.
It was from his lankiness and length of limb that he was called "_Long
Jack_." He stood about six feet six in his boots.
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