A CLERK PAID IN KIND.
Law is looking up at Manchester—to judge from a paragraph in the Morning Herald; to wit—
"Manchester Liberalism.—The following announcement has been posted on the walls of the Manchester Law Library:—'An experienced clerk, who writes a good hand, is wanted by a respectable solicitor in Manchester. Salary 7s. per week, with perquisites in the shape of cast-off clothes. Apply to the librarian.'"
Dull literalism would denounce the respectable solicitor who proposes to pay an experienced clerk principally in cast-off clothes, as a screw. Many a plodding fellow will expatiate on the unreasonableness on the part of a legal gentleman who remunerates a clerk on this scale, of being astonished that the said clerk should go seedy, or stretch forth his hand and commit acts contrary to ordinances and statutes in such case made and provided. It will occur to the stolid mind that the offer of a stipend of old clothes is not likely to attract any clerk of experience, beyond that of a Jew salesman. But the true man of figures, he who understands the language of Fancy, revelling in metaphor, perceives at once that the proposition which seems so stingy is, in fact, very liberal. He discerns that by cast-off clothes is meant a share in the business, consisting in those suits, which though considerably profitable, are not of sufficient importance to be attended to by the head of the establishment. It is pleasing to find the language of poetry thus obtaining, in a profession of which the phraseology has hitherto been so very unimaginative.