I recall strange neighbours and deskfellows who, not otherwise too objectionable, were uncanny and monstrous through their possession, cultivation, imitation of ledgers, daybooks, double-entry, tall pages of figures, interspaces streaked with oblique ruled lines that weirdly ‘balanced’, whatever that might mean, and other like horrors. Nothing in truth is more distinct to me than the tune to which they were, without exception, at their ease on such ground – unless it be my general dazzled, humiliated sense, through those years, of the common, the baffling, mastery, all round me […] Everyone did things and had things – everyone knew how, […], just as they kept in their heads such secrets for how to do sums […] Those who surrounded me were all agog, to my vision, with the benefit of their knowledge. I see them, in this light, across the years, fairly grin and grimace with it; and the presumable vulgarity of some of them, certain scattered shades of baseness still discernible, comes to me as but one of the appearances of an abounding play of genius. Who was it I ever thought stupid? All of which, I should add, didn’t in the least prevent my moving on the plane of the remarkable […]; I was fairly gorged with wonders. […] It was strange [that I was] so stupid without being more brutish and so perceptive without being more keen.