“Assist me?” he growled. “Oh hell! Assist me! Now look here, Blockhead, I do not intend to be assisted, and I’ll be damned if I’ll be assisted. I am only a young chap of seventy years of age. I’ve been here for thirty years at three dollars a day, and I don’t need assistance.” I believe the old chap would have worked himself into an actual rage in a minute.
“Now look here, Pa,” I said, placing my hand on his shoulder, much to his surprise, “I am going to assist you or not, just as you say, but first of all let us be friends, and I fancy we can have a bit of fun together.”
“What did you call me, sir?” he asked, pretending indignation.
“I called you ‘Pa,’” I said.
“Damned familiarity,” he exclaimed.
Ernest was now laughing heartily and the old man joined him with me.
“What did you call me?” I asked in pretended anger.
“‘Blockhead,’” said the old man, “and good enough for you, damn you.” And from that day till his death we were “Pa” and “Blockhead” to each other, and many were the pranks we played on others. The merry old soul died at seventy-six.
I enjoyed Pa very much, but my first glimpse of the Civil Service at close quarters did not arouse any particular enthusiasm within me. I looked upon a shabby world. I was rather a smart and well-kept looking person, and I felt out of place among the dingy, old, shabby-looking offices, which were badly ventilated and badly lighted, inhabited by a dingy, slipshod looking lot of nondescript humanity, not the kind of men I expected to be associated with at all. I found all sorts and conditions of men of just the same average of decency, intelligence and sobriety as are to be met with outside the service, no better and no worse. I did not find the pampered, well-fed, well-groomed and cultured lot of semi-idle gentlemen who are popularly supposed to exist on Civil Service salaries.
I had arrived in the Kingdom of the Automaton. It was at the end of the Political Era, when some pretence was being made to eliminate that kind of Pull which enabled a Minister, or any one who was politically strong, to dump any kind of humanity into the Civil Service, just because it served his personal ends. We had a clerk in the Department of Ways and Means who had been a waiter in an hotel, and was appointed in reward for services rendered a Minister during his numerous sprees. We had other persons just as objectionable, brought in for reasons just as edifying.