The chair was some
eighteen inches away with its back towards the table, so it was a
little troublesome for him to get his feet first on the bar and then
on the table. He was not at all hungry but he tried, saw it would
not be quite easy and gave it up; then he thought better of it and
tried again, and saw again that it was not all perfectly plain
sailing; and so backwards and forwards with the first-he-would-and-
then-he-wouldn'tism of a mind so nearly in equilibrium that a hair's
weight would turn the scale one way or the other.
I thought how closely it resembled the action of beer trickling on a
slightly sloping table.
The Union Bank
There is a settlement in the Union Bank building, Chancery Lane,
which has made three large cracks in the main door steps. I remember
these cracks more than twenty years ago, just after the bank was
built, as mere thin lines and now they must be some half an inch wide
and are still slowly widening. They have altered very gradually, but
not an hour or a minute has passed without a groaning and travailing
together on the part of every stone and piece of timber in the
building to settle how a modus vivendi should be arrived at. This is
why the crack is said to be caused by a settlement--some parts of the
building willing this and some that, and the battle going on, as even
the steadiest and most unbroken battles must go, by fits and starts
which, though to us appearing as an even tenor, would, if we could
see them under a microscope, prove to be a succession of bloody
engagements between regiments that sometimes lost and sometimes won.
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