nine in the morning
His father was the king of a little flourishing prison of desks , and Mike was one of the heirs-apparent . Consequently , his lot , though dull , was seldom bitter ; and many mitigations of it were within his privilege . With Henry it was different . He was a humble unit among twenty other slaves , chained to that modern substitute for the galleys , the desk ; and , in a wicked bargain , he had contracted to give his life-blood from nine in the morning till six in the evening , for sixty pounds a year , with an occasional `` rise , '' which , after thirty years ' service , might end in your having reached a proud annual three hundred for the rest of your maimed and narrowed days . Henry had come to the office straight from school , at the age of sixteen ; and , though classrooms breathe an air sufficiently frigid and suggestive of inhuman interests and unmeaning discipline , the icy air of that office had at first almost taken his breath . The place was so ridiculously serious ! There might conceivedly be interests in the world worthy of so abject an absorption , so bleaching an obeisance of the individual ; but Henry , with the dews of certain classics still upon him , remembered that anything really Olympian in its importance is always strong enough to smile .