A PICTURE AND A PARCEL.
Behind the most sample-roomey, fire-insuranceish, and express-wagonized part of Broadway, New York, yawns a venerable street called Nassau; wherein architecture is a monster of such hideous mien that to be hated needs but to be rented, and more full-grown men stare into shoe-stores and shirt-emporiums without buying anything than in any other part of the world. Near the lower end of this quaint avenue rises the Post-Office, sending aloft a wooden steeple which is the coffin of a dead clock, and looking, altogether, like some good, old-fashioned country church, which, having come to town many years ago to see its city cousins, and been discouraged by their brown-stone airs, retired, much demoralized, into a shady by-way, and there fell from grace into a kind of dissipated cross between Poor-House and railroad depot. To reach this amazing edifice, with too much haste for more than a momentary glimpse of its harrowing exterior, and to get away from it, with a speed as little complimentary to the charms of its shadow, are, apparently, the two great and exclusive objects of the thousands swarming down and up the narrow street all through a day. Some twenty odd boot-shops, all next-door-but-one to each other, startlingly alike in their despondent outer appearances, and uniformly conducted by embittered elderly men of savage aspect—seem to sue in vain from year to year for at least one customer; and as many other melancholy dens for the sale of exactly the things no one but a madman would want to buy while on his way to a Post-Office, or from it, appear to wait as hopelessly for the first purchaser. There are, too, no end of open-air dealers in such curious postal incidentals as ghastly apples, insulting neck-ties, and impracticable pocket-combs; to whom, possibly, an unwholesome errand boy may be seen applying for a bargain about once in the lifetime of an ordinary habitué of the street, but whose general wares were never seen selling to the extent of four shillings by any living observer. Still, with an affront to human credulity of which only newspapers are capable, it has been declared, in print, that there are bootmakers and apple-women of Nassau who continually buy choice up-town corner-lots with their profits; and, if it may be therefrom inferred that the other trades of the street do as incredibly well, it were wise, perhaps, to be further convinced that people have a well-established habit of stealthily laying in their new raiment, fruit, and toilet articles while going for their business-mails, and at once relinquish all earthly confidence in the senses obstinately refuting the theory.
About half-way between end and end of Nassau street stands a row of what were modest dwelling-houses in the remote days when the city was under the rule of the Americans, but are now only so many floors of law offices. Who owns them is not known; for proprietors of real-estate in this extraordinary highway of antiquity are never mentioned in public like owners in any other street; but they are shabby, dreary, hopeless-looking old piles, suggestive of having, perhaps, been hurried and tumbled through musty law-suits scores of times, and occupied at last by the robber Law itself for costs. On a certain dark, foggy afternoon in December, one of the seediest of the fallen brick brotherhood presented a particularly dingy appearance, as the gas-lights necessitated by the premature gloom of the hour gleamed dimly through a blearing window-pane here and there. The house still retained the narrow street-door, hall-way, and abrupt immediate stairway of its earlier days; and had, too, the old-style goodly single brown stone for a "stoop," along the front fall of which, in faded white block letters, as though originally done with a stencil-plate, appeared the strange device:
S—T—1860—X.
Whether this curious legend referred to the sweets or bitters of the tenement's various experiences; whether it meant Subjected To 1860 'Xecutions, or Sacrificed to 1860 'Xecutors, or Sentenced to Wait e'en Sixty 'Xigencies, did not bother the head of Mr. DIBBLE, who came in from Gowanus every morning to occupy his law-office up-stairs, and was sitting thoughtfully therein, before a grate fire, on the dull, wintry afternoon in question.
Severely unostentatious was that office, with its two ink-stained desks, shelves of lettered deed-boxes, glass case of law-books in sheep, and vellum-covered reading-table in the centre of the room. Its prompt lesson for the visitor was: You are now in the Office of an old-school Constitutional Lawyer, Sir; and if you want an Absolute Divorce, Obtained for No Cause, in Any State; No Publicity; No Charges; you must step around to a certain newspaper sanctum for your witnesses, and apply to some other legal practitioner. In this establishment, sir, after you have left your measure in the shape of a retaining fee, we fit you with a suit warranted to last as long as you do. We cut your pockets to suit ourselves, but furnish you as much choler as you can stand. If you are a pursey man the suit will have no lack of sighs for you; if you are thin, it will make your waste the greater.
Mr. DIBBLE'S usual companion in this office was his clerk, BLADAMS, who generally wrote at the second desk, and, consequently, was a person of another deskscription. A politician in former days—when he was known as Mr. WILLIAM ADAMS—this clerk had aspired to office in New York, and freely spent his means to attain the same. His name, however, was too much for his fortune. Public credulity revolted from the pretence that a WILLIAM ADAMS had come from Ireland some years before, on purpose to found the family of which the later candidate of the same name claimed to be a descendant; and, after an election in which he had spent the last of his money, he was "counted out" in favor of a rather hod character named O'GLOORAL. Thus practically taught to understand the political genius of a Republic, which, as gloriously contrasted with any effete monarchy ruled by a Peerage, looks for its own governing class to the Steerage, Mr. WILLIAM ADAMS subsided impecuniously into plain BILL ADAMS and a book-keepership in dry goods; and was ultimately blurred into BLADAMS and employment as a copyist by Mr. DIBBLE, to whom his experience of spending every cent he had in the world, and getting nothing in the world for it but wrinkles, seemed felicitously legal and almost supernaturally qualifying for law-writing. BLADAMS was about forty years old, though appearing much older: with a slight cast in his left eye, a pimply pink countenance, and a circular piece of unimproved property on top of his head.
"Any news?" inquired Mr. DIBBLE, as this member of the once powerful American race entered the office and still grasped the edge of the door.
"I saw Mr. DROOD across the street just now," was the answer.
"And what did he say, BLADAMS?"