Again, I was free and still characterless. This time I suffered, as no doubt I deserved, hunger, thirst, and pain before I again entered employment, but when I did get a berth it promised fairer than any of my previous ones. Just how I fell in with this astounding piece of luck, I have forgotten, but what is indelibly impressed upon my memory is the fact that in my new situation I received board and clothing and two shillings a week--quite sufficient to pay for my poor little bed in a room which I shared with a cobbler, who used it for a workshop, toiling far into the night after I had gone to sleep; but while I was awake, entertaining me vastly with scraps of quaint philosophy. No wonder I was what they used to call an old-fashioned kid! But bless that dear old cobbler's heart. He was gentle, kind, and wise, except in one direction, but even in his cups I never remember hearing him say ought that a little child might not listen to, or ask and obtain the meaning of unsullied. He was very fond of me, and I of him. I daresay we meant a great deal to each other, meeting as we did in that little eddy out of the great rapids of life, and without visible effort supplying each other's needs. I well remember meeting him one day--it must have been when I was looking for a job--surrounded by a little mob of children "avin a gime wiv im" in the vernacular. Taking me gently by the arm he said, with a grand wave of his free hand, "Now here is an example for you, ill-mannered brats that you are, that can only shout 'Ullo, Trotty.' I know I trot, I know I am old, but you are ill-bred to remind me of it, and as for this dear child!" And much to my horror and entire discomfiture, he lifted me up and kissed me. I did not get over that, or escape the consequences of his ill-timed affection for a long time, I promise you. But I am forgetting Mr Green, my employer. He kept an establishment in Westbourne Grove for the manufacture and sale of paper patterns of fashionable dresses. In those far-off days I think he must have been a pioneer in this business, and I know he used to visit Paris periodically, in order to obtain the latest modes; and returning with them, his wife and her assistants reduplicated them in coloured paper, which elaborate models were exhibited in a grand show-room and sold. My business was to wear a fine suit of clothes with many silvered buttons, and lie hidden in the hall to conduct clients upstairs to the show-rooms, which was on the first floor over a shop. Another and more important part of my duties was to carry parcels to clients' houses, at which times I wore a shiny top-hat bedecked with silver braid. Indeed, so fine was I that my old companions of the street forbore to guy me, but paid me undisguised tribute of admiration for my splendour.