Chapter I Summary

The narrator hadn't heard from Blue for a year. He last heard from Blue in a letter from England on Blue's travels to Tyburn and the important places in the life of Sir Thomas More. He urges Blue to get a nice job or he says Blue will end up in the poorhouse. Blue responds that it would be glorious to live in the poorhouse.

Blue, not yet thirty, would have been happy in a poorhouse; he was without money and when he found it he gave it away. He lived impoverished, but 'gloriously ... and religiously' and with the air of a monk without an Order. His life was his job and he made life beautiful where he went, bringing others to be kinder and a few more generous. The narrator suspects that when he returned from England with nothing, he'd...