My delight was somewhat tempered by the fact that my hours of business were to be from 4.30 A.M. to 9 P.M., on Sunday and week-day alike, in summer; and from 5.30 A.M. to 9 P.M. in winter. But of course that was merely a detail. As I had to begin at so unholy an hour in the morning, of course it was unthinkable that I could get any food in the house, and so my landlady made arrangements, in consideration of receiving the whole of my earnings _and_ the milk, to subsidise a local coffee-stall keeper to the extent of one cup of coffee and one slice of cake, price together one penny, every morning. This I bolted at the street corner, often scalding my mouth, for I need hardly say that the margin of time was never very great. And if a boy arrived late, well, there was an end, for his van had gone without him, since it might not linger, obstructing the others. After swallowing my coffee, I fled as fast as my legs would carry me towards my place of business (sounds important, doesn't it?), which, when I reached it, was a roaring vortex of noise. For the railway vans had just arrived from Paddington Station, and the huge churns of milk were being shifted with much clangour and shouting from the street to the cellar of the shop, where their contents were being distributed into the polished churns which went into the distributing vans. Every man and boy was hard at work, the majority fitting out their respective vans with cans, kettles, etc.; and in half an hour from beginning this work, every van (there were sixteen of them) with its driver and its attendant boy, a crate full of empty cans, and two brimming churns of milk, had rattled off towards the district, often three or four miles away, which was allotted to it. In summer this eager rush and excitement was rather pleasant, and more in the nature of a huge frolic than otherwise; but in winter, on bitter, bleak, snowy, or wet mornings, it was undoubtedly terribly hard upon such children as I, poorly clad and insufficiently fed, as most of us were. There were two of us in my van besides the driver, it being a _heavy_ district, and there was consequently considerable rivalry between my fellow-worker and myself, which kept both of us from lagging. Our boss was a gruff, unsociable sort of fellow, but he must have had a soft spot in his heart somewhere, for he invariably pulled up at the first coffee stall (it was set against a dead wall, nearly opposite the entrance to Kensington Palace Gardens, I remember), and treated each of us to a pennyworth of coffee and cake; and this kindness he repeated when we had finished our round, if the weather was cold.