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I had very little to do here in the way of errand-running, but I had no idle moments, and when not occupied in the almost interminable job of dusting the stock and cleaning out the shop, I could always find work below, making paste and lining the cheap boxes we made for servants. And here I was quite happy, for the journeyman was a genial soul and beguiled the time with jokes and snatches of song, often too giving me a portion of his frugal dinner or a halfpenny, which I promptly invested in "broken stale" at the baker's hard by, where I purchased the governor's coburgs.

But it was a dull, hard, monotonous life, and only for the fact that I occasionally got hold of a copy of the "Boys of England," "The Young Briton," or the "Sons of Britannia," among the waste-paper we used for linings, and lost myself in the realms of romance with "Caradoc the Briton," "Alone in the Pirate's Lair," or the "Young Centurion," there would have been hardly a gleam of sunshine in my young life. Those blessed stories supplied the place of pleasant companions and of kind words, and were in a great measure educational—at any rate, they were all the schooling in one sense that I had.