I answered, "Nothing, _I'm_ sane enough, but seeing that our first business transaction in the shop is to sell an article for a shilling which cost us eighteenpence, I do not know what I might have been if I hadn't laughed." And I have to laugh now when I think of it. That was our first customer, and she had a bargain. Somehow I persisted in looking at the transaction in a humorous light, and so it didn't hurt us, and presently fate made us amends by bringing a friend in who was to me for all those grievous four years a veritable godsend. He was, like myself, a stranger in the neighbourhood, indeed he was a stranger to London, having come up to take charge of a branch library. He "happened in" as the Americans say, just to ask if I had some kind of nails or screws or something like that, for he was an ingenious chap, and always doing something or other to make the temporary library over which he presided more fit for its purpose without too much extra expense. We got into conversation quite easily, and he was speedily in possession of my story. For, I was literally aching to tell it to someone, and I could not have found a more sympathetic listener. He was, I think, one of those people who are often cruelly described as "nobody's enemy" but his own, but who should be better described as everybody's friend but his own, for a more unselfish chap never lived, and that character is, whatever its other faults may be, possessed of the golden virtue of helpfulness in an eminent degree. Well, before we had been talking an hour he was installed as the friend of the family, in which unenviable position, as far as he was concerned, he reigned without a rival all the time we had the business. It was a bright and cheery episode, and did me more good than a hundred customers would have done, so that I went to bed that night feeling quite contented, and happy. I had found a friend who would be a friend indeed.