, he resolved to banish them from his thoughts by dint of hard walking.
So, taking up his hat, and leaving poor Smike to arrange and re-arrange the room
with as much delight as if it had been the costliest palace, he betook himself
to the streets, and mingled with the crowd which thronged them.
    Although a man may lose a sense of his own importance when he is a mere unit
among a busy throng, all utterly regardless of him, it by no means follows that
he can dispossess himself, with equal facility, of a very strong sense of the
importance and magnitude of his cares. The unhappy state of his own affairs was
the one idea which occupied the brain of Nicholas, walk as fast as he would; and
when he tried to dislodge it by speculating on the situation and prospects of
the people who surrounded him, he caught himself, in a few seconds, contrasting
their condition with his own, and gliding almost imperceptibly back into his old
train of thought again.
    Occupied in these reflections, as he was making his way along one of the
great public thoroughfares of London, he chanced to raise his eyes to a blue
board, whereon was inscribed, in characters of gold, »General Agency Office; for
places and situations of all kinds inquire within.« It was a shop-front, fitted
up with a gauze blind and an inner door; and in the window hung a long and
tempting array of written placards, announcing vacant places of every grade,
from a secretary's to a footboy's.
    Nicholas halted, instinctively, before this temple of promise, and ran his
eye over the capital-text openings in life which were so profusely displayed.
When he had completed his survey he walked on a little way, and then back, and
then on again; at length, after pausing irresolutely several times before the
door of the General Agency Office, he made up his mind, and stepped in.
    He found himself in a little floor-clothed room, with a high desk railed off
in one corner, behind which sat a lean youth with cunning eyes and a protruding
chin, whose performances in capital-text darkened the window. He had a thick
ledger lying open before him, and with the fingers of his right hand inserted
between the leaves, and his eyes fixed on a very fat old lady in a mob-cap -
evidently the proprietress of the establishment - who was airing herself at the
fire, seemed to be only waiting her directions to refer to some entries
contained within its rusty clasps.
    As there was
