Pepe

Book 2: The Golden Thread, Chapter 1: Five Years Later Original Text
Tellson‟s Bank by Temple Bar was an old-fashioned place, even in the year one thousand seven hundred and eighty. It was very small, very dark, very ugly, very incommodious. It was an oldfashioned place, moreover, in the moral attribute that the partners in the House were proud of its smallness, proud of its darkness, proud ofits ugliness, proud of its incommodiousness. They were even boastful of its eminence in those particulars, and were fired by an express conviction that, if it were less objectionable, it would be less respectable. This was no passive belief, but an active weapon which they flashed at more convenient places of business. Tellson‟s (they said) wanted no elbow-room, Tellson‟s wanted no light, Tellson‟swanted no embellishment. Noakes and Co.‟s might, or Snooks Brothers‟ might; but Tellson‟s, thank Heaven!— Any one of these partners would have disinherited his son on the question of rebuilding Tellson‟s. In this respect the House was much on a par with the Country; which did very often disinherit its sons for suggesting improvements in laws and customs that had long been highly objectionable,but were only the more respectable. Thus it had come to pass, that Tellson‟s was the triumphant perfection of inconvenience. After bursting open a door of idiotic obstinacy with a weak rattle in its throat, you fell into Tellson‟s down two steps, and came to your senses in a miserable little shop, with two little counters, where the oldest of men made your cheque shake as if the wind rustled it,while they examined the signature by the dingiest of windows, which were always under a shower-bath of mud from Fleet-street, and which were made the dingier by their own iron bars proper, and the heavy shadow of Temple Bar. If your business necessitated your seeing “the House,” you were put into a species of Condemned Hold at the back, where you meditated on a misspent life, until the House camewith its bands in its pockets, and you could hardly blink at it in the dismal twilight. Your money came out of, or went into, wormy old wooden drawers, particles of which flew up your nose and down your throat when they were opened and shut. Your bank-notes had a musty odour, as if they were fast decomposing into rags again. Your plate was stowed away among the neighbouring cesspools, and evilcommunications corrupted its good polish in a day or two. Your deeds got into extemporised strong-rooms made of kitchens and sculleries, and fretted all the fat out of their parchments into the banking-house air. Your lighter boxes of family papers went up-stairs into a Barmecide room, that always had a great dining-table in it and never had a dinner, and where, even in the year one thousand sevenhundred and eighty, the first letters written to you by your old love, or by your little children, were but newly released from the horror of being ogled through the windows, by the heads exposed on Temple Bar with an insensate brutality and ferocity worthy of Abyssinia or Ashantee.

Modern Text
Tellson‟s Bank near Temple Bar was an old-fashioned place, even back in 1780. It was very small, verydark, very ugly, and very uncomfortable. The partners who ran the bank were old-fashioned too. They were proud of its smallness, darkness, ugliness, and discomfort. They even boasted that their bank was all these things, and they believed that it if hadn‟t been so unpleasant, it wouldn‟t have been so well respected. The bankers liked to brag about this to their competitors. Tellson‟s Bank, they wouldsay, didn‟t need elbow room or bright light or fancy decorations. Maybe Noakes and Co. or Snooks Brothers needed these things, but not Tellson‟s Bank!

Any one these partners would have disinherited his own son for suggesting they refurbish Tellson‟s. In this way, Tellson‟s was like England, which did often punish its citizens for trying to improve laws and customs. But the fact that people...