I gave up my friends.  Their help in the hour of need is a beautiful theory, but very seldom put into practice.

Just as I was growing dull and dispirited, a friend upon whom I had not called, and whose aid I had not solicited, wrote to me and offered me a situation as clerk in his office, with a salary of eighty pounds per annum, to be afterward increased.  God send to every weary heart the comfort this news brought to mine.  I ran to Clare with the letter in my hands.

“Eighty pounds a year, darling!” I cried; “there is a fortune.”

We had neither of us ever had much to do with money; we were quite ignorant of its value, how far it would go, what it would purchase, etc.  It seemed an inexhaustible sum.  We had cheap, comfortable apartments in Holloway—­a room for my sister and two smaller rooms for myself.  When I think of her patience, her resignation, her unvarying sweetness, her constant cheerfulness, my heart does homage to the virtue and goodness of women.

One fine morning in September I went for the first time to work.  The office of Lawson Brothers was in Lincoln’s Inn.  The elder brother seldom if ever appeared; the younger was always there.  He gave me a very kindly welcome, said he hoped I should not find my work tiresome, showed me what I had to do, and, altogether, set me at my ease.

I sighed many times that morning to find of how little use was my college education to me now and I sighed to think how all my dreams, all my hopes and aspirations, had ended behind a clerk’s desk, with eighty pounds per annum in lieu of the fortune of which I had dreamed.

After a few days I became used to the novelty and did my best to discharge my duties well.

Hundreds of young men in London lead lives similar to mine, with very little variety; the only way in which I differed from them was that I had my sister Clare to provide for.  Alas! how soon I found out what a small sum eighty pounds a year was!  When we had paid the rent of our three rooms, set aside a small sum for clothes and a small sum for food, there was nothing left.  Clare, whose appetite was dainty and delicate, suffered greatly.  I could not manage to provide even a bunch of grapes for her; the trifling coppers I spent in flowers, that cheered her as nothing else ever did, were sorely missed.

How I longed sometimes to take home a ripe peach, a bottle of wine, an amusing book!  But every penny was rigorously needed; there was not one to spare.  How I pitied her for the long hours she spent alone in those solitary lodgings!  A bright inspiration came to me one day; I thought how glad I should be if I could get some work to do at night, if it were but possible to earn a few shillings.  I advertised again, and after some time succeeded in getting copying to do, for which I was not overwell paid.