I was all impatience to get to the office with them, nor, although I am the least optimistic person alive, could I feel any great amount of trepidation as to whether they would be favourably received or not. It was a long and weary walk across the park from Kilburn to Westminster, and my hands were blue with the cramping cold through carrying my precious pictures, but I cared nothing for that. I was for the time being satisfied with myself. And yet as I drew near the office where my amateur work would be submitted to the shrewd if not unkindly judgment of my fellows, and I should learn once for all whether in the city man's phrase there "was money in it," I had hard work to keep my spirits up. Fortunately I did not know what the odds were against me, a blissful ignorance which has saved many a struggler from collapse of dread before the fight has begun. It is just possible that my work of totalling and meaning massive columns of figures, mechanical and monotonous as it had become, suffered that morning from utter lack of any ability on my part to think of what I was doing. But at last the luncheon interval of three quarters of an hour came, and having bolted my usual dinner of bread and cheese, I began my tour of the various rooms with my work. I sold my pictures to the first man I showed them to at a good profit on the usual terms of five shillings a month, but he very kindly allowed me to tote them all round the office, by which means I secured orders for six more. Better than that I heard words of praise to which I had almost always been a stranger, praise of my work, at which I was far too gratified to inquire whether those who uttered it were competent critics, or were trying to get my wares a little cheaper, or on a little easier terms. It was a day to be marked with a white stone, and I find it impossible now to recall any definite idea of the multitudinous schemes of infinite pettiness which that day's success hatched in my brain. I can only say that in their prospective wealth of a few shillings extra a week, they were just as important, I was just as earnest in considering them, as any millionaire manipulator of stocks and shares, even though he looks for more tens of thousands from other people's labour than I looked for units from my own.