seven o’clock in the evening
There are varieties of the genus , too numerous to recapitulate , but however numerous they may be , they are all to be seen , at certain regulated business hours , hurrying to and from the places we have just mentioned . These sequestered nooks are the public offices of the legal profession , where writs are issued , judgments signed , declarations filed , and numerous other ingenious machines put in motion for the torture and torment of His Majesty 's liege subjects , and the comfort and emolument of the practitioners of the law . They are , for the most part , low - roofed , mouldy rooms , where innumerable rolls of parchment , which have been perspiring in secret for the last century , send forth an agreeable odour , which is mingled by day with the scent of the dry-rot , and by night with the various exhalations which arise from damp cloaks , festering umbrellas , and the coarsest tallow candles . About half-past seven o'clock in the evening , some ten days or a fortnight after Mr. Pickwick and his friends returned to London , there hurried into one of these offices , an individual in a brown coat and brass buttons , whose long hair was scrupulously twisted round the rim of his napless hat , and whose soiled drab trousers were so tightly strapped over his Blucher boots , that his knees threatened every moment to start from their concealment . He produced from his coat pockets a long and narrow strip of parchment , on which the presiding functionary impressed an illegible black stamp . He then drew forth four scraps of paper , of similar dimensions , each containing a printed copy of the strip of parchment with blanks for a name ; and having filled up the blanks , put all the five documents in his pocket , and hurried away . The man in the brown coat , with the cabalistic documents in his pocket , was no other than our old acquaintance Mr. Jackson , of the house of Dodson & Fogg , Freeman 's Court , Cornhill .