Which sentence in this excerpt from Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener" best exhibits the use of verbal irony?

A) Before, I had never experienced aught but a not unpleasing sadness.
B) Upon inspection, the drawer exhibited a great array of the shells of various sorts of nuts. Indeed, to this quick-witted youth, the whole noble science of the law was contained in a nutshell.
C) So he sent him to my office, as student at law, errand boy, cleaner and sweeper, at the rate of one dollar a week.
D) For the first time in my life a feeling of overpowering stinging melancholy seized me.