Consume us; shake the darkness like a tree, And fill the night with mischiefs, — blights and dwales, Weevils, and rots, and cankers!

‘Pencil pusher’ is a despective term for ‘administrative clerk’.

On the ground floor of a dim house in a dim street, which by the contrivance of its occupants had been converted from its original role of dark and sinister dining-room to wareroom for a dozen or more perambulators on high, rubber-tired wheels, Alphonse Michelson and Gertie Dobriner stood in conference with a dark-wrappered figure, her blue-checked apron wound muff fashion about her hands.

Uriah Heep is a meecher.